Mood: rueful fogey

[steepholm]

When I was at college one of my lecturers was known for his love of drink, his roving hands, and his work on the Leeds University dialect survey. His lectures were pretty dull, except when he was talking about dialect itself (he was a specialist on the different words used for “barn” in west Cornwall, and really knew how to make the subject come alive), but he did have a nice line in maps. He was especially fond of the isogloss, the linguistic equivalent of an isobar. For example, there is a line that runs from the Severn to the Wash, north of which ‘u’ is pronounced with lips rounded, south of which with lips more open. He called it the bugger-bugger line, though it’s hard to convey the pronunciation here. I wonder if that’s common usage amongst linguists?

Then there was the truce-term map. Folklorists and dialecticians have been long been interested in truce terms - at least since Iona and Peter Opie produced their accounts of playground usage half a century ago. Barley, fainites, pax, scribs, kings, skinch, and the rest, were shown to be very specific – to towns or even to neighbourhoods. A ‘scribs’ town might be found floating in a sea of rural barley. And these terms were old! “Barley” goes back at least to Gawain and the Green Knight, for example (I. 296), and prior to that (I assume) to the knightly request for a “parley”. Ever since those lectures, truce terms have had been highly evocative for me – secret histories of Britain, passed down by those least in a position to understand them in a series of intergenerational Chinese whispers.

So, I was surprised yesterday, playing tag in garden with my daughter, when (being a little out of breath) I asked what she and her friends said when they wanted to suspend a game. She looked at me blankly for a minute – then, understanding, answered: “We say ‘Pause’, of course.”

It makes sense, I admit. Even so, it’s sad to see a delicate posy of rare linguistic orchids crushed under the monocultural heel of the Nintendo Gamecube.

Comments

[hafren.livejournal.com]

I feel really unimaginative now, because all I ever said was "stop", or "I don't want to play any more". I've read "pax" in novels but never heard anyone use it, and all the rest were new to me (I grew up in Essex and Nottingham, in the fifties and sixties). Is there a gender gap here - are boys more likely to play the kind of rough contact games that would make them need these words? We used to play mainly skipping games.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Growing up in Essex and east London in the fifties and early sixties, we certainly said "fainites", accompanied by crossed fingers. And I was thrilled to find it on the Opies' map - doubly thrilled when my father confirmed that, as the map indicated, he had indeed said "skinch" in the north-east in the 20s.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

I think we had "barley" - it does sound dimly familiar.

What I remember most vividly is the supposedly random method of selecting somebody for the key role in a game (I think I eventually realised that it would be possible to work out who it was going to be arithmetically, though I never actually bothered to do so). "Spuds out." [Everyone holds out two clenched fists.] "One p'tater, two p'tater, three p'tater, four, five p'tater, six p'tater, seven p'tater, more." [The "more" fist is knocked out and held behind the back, then the counting of p'taters resumes until only one is left.] Did everyone have this, or were there variants?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

All these things seem to have variants. "Ip dip sky blue" is another rhyme used for the same purpose, as is "Eeny meeny miny mo" - which was the standard when I was young. We always used it in the unacceptable version: "Eeny meeny miny mo, Catch a nigger by the toe, If he hollers let him go, you - are - not - it". (In truth I had no idea then what "nigger" meant, or that it meant anything at all, any more than eeny, meeny or miny. These days it seems to be pretty universally a tiger that's caught.)

It's strange, though. People in the UK did of course say "nigger" in the 1960s, if not in my hearing - but "holler"? That marks the rhyme pretty unmistakably as American. So how and when did it drift over here? During the war, perhaps?

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

Is that related to "Dip dip dip, My blue ship, Sailing on the water, Like a cup and saucer, O-U-T spells out"? We had that too, but I'd forgotten it. I was aware of Eeny meeny, but don't think I ever heard it used.

[rhus-typhina.livejournal.com]

Interesting, that those terms have such a long history...

We used to say "tui" (which makes no more sense in German than it does in English). Now I wonder were that word came from.

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

I was an expat brat in Turkey in the mid-1980s. We said 'pax' in chasing games, 'mercy' for arm-wrestling and fighting, and in imaginative games when we wanted to come out of character we crossed our hands, one vertically and one horizontally to make a T-shape. I think the last was an American import for 'time out' (from the gesture made by referees in American football?); the old-fashioned 'pax' must have had something to do with the mixture of class backgrounds in an expat culture.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

I've seen "pax" in books, of course, but I've never heard or used any of those terms in practice. (Fifteen or twenty years ago, growing up in Philadelphia, I would have used "pause." We did have Nintendo by then.) I wonder whether any of the rest of the words ever did come to America.