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On another board I frequent, someone has enquired about the word miggsy. Anne McCaffrey uses it in her science fiction Dragonriders of Pern series for a marble (as in the children's game of marbles). The point at issue is whether she coined the word herself or whether it is a "real" word. Could someone with access to DARE or other dialect dictionaries check whether it appears, please. Someone has already checked OED but it doesn't appear in there.
Last edited by Bingley; 11/11/05 07:17 AM.
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miggle, n
1969 in Dict. Amer. Regional Eng. (1996) s.v. mig, The plain ones [sc. marbles] are the ones that you try to hit the set-up with... Then the other guys would try to hit that set-up with the common marbles. But meanwhile all the common marbles you took in were yours, and that was miggles.
citation from OED online (DRAFT ENTRY Mar. 2002)
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That is, as opposed to aggies.
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or steelies.. shooters could be steelies too.
i collect glass and stone (aggies) marbles for display. (most of them i've found on the the street, some in dirt of city parks (i've got an eye for them!) some are chipped from encounters with steelies. (i have 2 aggies in the collection of about 50 marbles)
i never much played marbles. but i did play skully and ringalevio (cross threading.. these words/games should be in the old (fashioned) word thread.
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Quote:
or steelies.. shooters could be steelies too.
i collect glass and stone (aggies) marbles for display. (most of them i've found on the the street, some in dirt of city parks (i've got an eye for them!) some are chipped from encounters with steelies. (i have 2 aggies in the collection of about 50 marbles)
i never much played marbles. but i did play skully and ringalevio (cross threading.. these words/games should be in the old (fashioned) word thread.
To this list of aggies and steelies and miggles I would add "immie." As in "Five if you hit the immie!" The immie was the target, never the prize, and again (if it was your immie) you got to keep any unsuccessful attempts.
-- the Bronx, ca. 1948, personal communication
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wofa, you're older than I thought. Somehow I didn't think you were in any state to be receiving personal communications in 1948. 
Bingley
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...or hollering out "five if you hit the immie" either. Actually it was 1949, not 48, and "Fifty if you hit the immie!" I must have been a very poor judge of distances in those days, too - even making him stand half-way across the street, I got cleaned out on the very first shot. Mustn't have been a very wide street after all.
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Pooh-Bah
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"play miggsy" gets no hits at all. The term must be relatively obscure
dalehileman
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as DARE has mig or miggles for the common marbles won, perhaps Ms. McCaffrey did take personal liberties with the word.
here's what OED has for as etym. for mig:
Origin uncertain; cf. slightly earlier MIGGLE n., and also MIGGIE n. Eng. Dial. Dict. (s.v. mag n.2) records also in similar senses the forms meg, meggy, mag, and Dict. Amer. Regional Eng. (s.vv. meg, mig) the forms meg, meggie, migalo, migget, miglet; cf. also maggie, recorded in Dict. Amer. Regional Eng. as a variant of AGGIE n.
all kinds of variants, but no miggsy.
---
on a related note, I've just found this in Cat's Eye, by Margaret Atwood:
For marbles you're either the person sitting up the target or the person shooting... Usually the targets are more valuable: cat's eyes, clear glass with a bloom of colored petals in the centre, red or yellow or green or blue; puries, flawless like colored water or sapphires or rubies; waterbabies with undersea filaments of color suspended in them; metal bowlies; aggies, like marbles only bigger. These exotics are passed from winner to winner. it's cheating to buy them; they have to be won.
The cat's eyes are my favorite. If I win a new one I wait until I'm by myself, then take it out and examine it, turning it over and over in the light. The cat's eyes really are like eyes, but not the eyes of cats. They're the eyes of something that isn't known but exists anyway.
Last edited by tsuwm; 11/12/05 08:22 PM.
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