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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Now I'm not old enough, I might be later  , however, Dad told me about it. Tell us the rules, and we'll get a team together!  (..."another crack like that and I oughta"...) My guess starts crack in a quarry(hit me tsuwm). Ya load 16 tons, an wha da ya get...a bag o' aggies! Speaking of fowl, why is it called "getting goosed"? The angle of attack, perhaps? ...it looks like it's gonna rain, dear!
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Joined: Sep 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Santa is "In his underware!"Always wondered how he keeps his floppy drive warm.
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Joined: Nov 2000
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veteran
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veteran
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Mumbledy-peg was not a marbles game. It was a game played exclusively by boys, using their pocket knives. Basically, you had to perform, in sequence, a series of manouvres or tricks, of increasing difficulty, with your knife in the grass (not in the dirt, since that tended to dull the blade). Girls, of course, did not have knives. This brings up the astonishing fact, which I learned from a newspaper article recently, that marbles is still a very popular pastime in some parts (rural) of the US and there are large tournaments and -- blasphemous thought -- GIRLS TAKE PART. That was unthinkaable in my youth. The sexes each had their own activities, like jumping rope for girls, marbles & mumbledy-peg for boys, and taking part in the others' games would have been like cross-dressing.
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Joined: Apr 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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I agree completely, byb. I was amused to find this in OED:
mumble-the-peg {I guess we must have mumbled this}
Now U.S.
A boys' game in which each player in turn throws a knife from a series of positions, continuing until he fails to make the blade stick in the ground. Hence mumblety-pegging vbl. n.
The unsuccessful player is compelled to draw out of the ground with his teeth a peg which the others have driven in with a certain number of blows with the handle of the knife. In Antrim the game is said to have been played with a fork instead of a knife (see E.D.D.). In Scotland it is locally called ‘knifie’.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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The sexes each had their own activities, like jumping rope for girls, marbles & mumbledy-peg for boys, and taking part in the others' games would have been like cross-dressing.
B'more must have been even more Puritanical than New England. I played marbles and beat the boys at the game with an acceptable degree of success in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
wow
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Joined: Jan 2001
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old hand
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old hand
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I played marbles in northern Alberta. But that was in the early '80s. So maybe not as shocking.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Girls could and did play marbles and skulley-- but these were boys games ( jump rope and jacks were girls sport)
by HS--soft ball as co-ed but baseball (hardball) was male-- Touch football the boys liked to be co-ed-- they like the touch part.
mumbley peg was definate still a boys game in the 50's and 60's-- I started carrying a knife at age 13-- i wasn't a tough kid-- but i found it usefull (i still carry a "swiss army" type knife) but would never think to play mumbley peg.
Everyone played ringalevio, nowdays most kids have never even heard of it!
Last month NYTimes reported on world championship Double Dutch contest (held in Harlem) winner were a co-ed team from Japan- most US teams are still all female.
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Maybe the most popular game, mostly for boys but occasionally a girl might be admitted, was stickball, which has many variations. The urban (New York) variation is for narrow streets with row houses right up to the sidewalk, played usually with a rubber ball and a broomstick. My father, my 2 brothers, and my 2 sisters and I played it with a baseball bat and a ball made up of tightly-rolled-up worn out old sweatsocks in the side yard. It got really challenging (especially for my mother) when the mulberry tree which hung over the infield was dropping ripe fruits.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Stick ball-- as i know it was always played with a stick-- the handle of a mop or broom (handle where sold seperately from mop head or broom heads)
and we played a variation of kick the can.
Before cans had "refunds" (only bottles did) you could crush the can (steel, not todays aluminum) and flatten it.
The game was played in an intersection with two storm drains (sewers) at diagonal corners-- (we had one intersection in the area that had 4 storm drains-- one on each corner- and played a four team or doubles)
the game is similar to soccar-- only every time you score a goal you lost your can--
To form the can right, you needed a can that had both lids intact--so a soda or beer can that had been punctured --with a church key-- was fine, but a can that had the top lid cut off by a can opener wasn't.
we also played "jonny on the pony" and many varieties of hand ball-- all with spaldeens--little pink hand balls from the Spalding NY Ball company. spaldeen is a NY corruption, from the Irish--where een is used as a diminutive ie, Maureen (for Maura) Peggeen (for Peggy or Margaret). The Spalding company made many balls, but little balls where spaldeens. Eens shows up in some other irish words (smithereens-- little pieces) "smashed to smithereens!"
Colleen, now a common girls name, was once a pet name, like pumkin, or peaches, or sugar plum-- but it was "little lump of coal" . Coal (if you don't have to mine it, or shovel it into a boiler) is really quite beautiful-- all black and shiny. (and as imported sourse of fuel, expensive!) and it is used as an adjective. a little girl, with shiny dark hair or eyes might be compared favorable to a lump of coal and called a coleen. As time passed, it just became complimentary, latter as just a way to describe a pretty girl (a colleen) and finally, began to be used as a name--
My mother used to gag every time she heard it used as a name-- and went crazy that priest would accept it as a name-- since they had rejected my mother choice of Deirdre-- as a pagan name, and not one to be used for a baptism!
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Carpal Tunnel
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>apparently in Minnesota, the recognized convention is "Duck, Duck, Grey Duck"
I suspect this is out of respect for their neighbors to the SE. The Michiganders (and the Michigeese).
TEd
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