Roomba Roomba

[lydy]

Well, I've appeared to have named my roomba. Normally, I prefer to name my inanimate objects elegant names, preferably Greek or Roman deities. However, the roomba has decided that its name is Red Rover. (It is a red roomba, at least.)

Did any of you play Red Rover, Red Rover when you were kids? You had two lines of kids in parallel lines, holding hands. One side would call out, "Red Rover, Red Rover, send So-and-So over." So-and-So would run and try to break through the other line. Mayhem ensued, occasionally injury resulted. If the chosen victim broke through the line, they joined that team. Depending on house rules, either the winning team got to choose a new victim, or it was the other team's turn.

While I'm off on a tangent, does anyone remember dodge ball being a kinder, gentler game, or was it painful hell for you all, too?

Whee. A very tangential tangent. I've been kind of making a collection of kid's games, kid's rhymes, odd sayings, and camp songs that I've learned that are different from the ones other people learned. Are they regionalisms, differences in age, differences in culture, or just plain different 'cause things aren't always the same?

There is, of course, the important controversy of "duck, duck, goose" versus "duck, duck, grey duck." The only thing I have to say to that is "duck, duck, grey duck" doesn't scan.

How did you pronounce "ally-ally-all-out-oxen-free"? In Pittsburgh, we said, "ally-ally-out-in-free."

Did you chant "Old mother witch, fell in a ditch, picked up a penny and thought she was rich," or any variation thereon? How about, "Hark, hark, the dogs do bark, but they never bark at me." I think that one is from Thurber's "13 Clocks", but all I remember is the rhyme.

Did you call them thorn bushes or pricker bushes? How about baby doll or doll baby? Trivet or hot plate? And of course, casserole or hotdish. Ever chant to an apple seed, "If you love me, pop and turn, if you hate me, sit and burn"? My grandmother taught me that.

Ever hear "all about Robin Hood's barn"? How about "land o' Goshen." Is it "could't hit a barn door", "couldn't hit the broad side of a barn", or "couldn't hit a barn if he were inside"?

"Bright eyed and bushy tailed", "sure as god made little green apples", and "like likes like."

I do know that I'm the only person I know that says "red up the cupboard" meaning clean the closet, and that couple means more two or more and usually less than five.

When it gets warmer, anybody want to go out and have a bonfire, put hot dogs and marshmallows on sticks, and sing campfire songs? I call dibs on the bear song.

Oh, returning to the topic that was at hand some time ago, the bot seems to like being called Red Rover. Roombas seem to generally like everything, though. They're nice, cheerful little creatures. Their one real flaw is that they can't cope with electrical cords, which means that in a house like mine, there's some significant prep work that has to happen before I can let Red Rover off on his cheerful mission of making much noise and slowly, but entirely unsupervisedly, vacuuming my floors. Yay, robots.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We used to play Red Rover, Red Rover on the church parking lot at Vacation Bible School. The church had no lawn to play on, and they had to let us have a few Jesus-free minutes a day or our heads would have exploded. It was, unfortunately, an all-ages thing, kindergarten through eighth grade. When I was on the small end of that, I was very stubborn (surprise!) and went running at two older kids. They snapped their hands up at my neck suddenly and knocked me straight backwards into the pavement. The only concern from them was whether I was going to "be a baby" or not. (Because adults, apparently, enjoy needless contact between their skull and asphalt.) And Mom wondered why I didn't care to participate in Youth Group at that church....

I was explaining to timprov about "Magdalena Hagdalena," the song I learned in Girl Scouts where the woman turns out to be a traffic light. He complained bitterly: "Why were we never taught blatantly surrealist songs in the Boy Scouts?" Just a flaw in the program, I guess.

The bear song: "The other day I met a bear," that one? Or, "The bear went over the mountain"? Or something else? When I was really sick in college and got delirious, "The Bear Went Over the Mountain" made me really, really upset, because I was absolutely sure that he had expected something much better than the other side of the mountain. But it was all that he could see. This made me cry, and the fact that he climbed another mountain did not cheer me. It convinced my friends that they should maybe keep me from attending Organic Chem lab that day.

[carbonel]

Is "Magdalena Hagdalena" the one that has the chorus ""Magdalena Hagdalena Whosenmyer Waldemyer Hogan Logan Bogan was her name"?

If so, I don't recall anything about the traffic light, but she had two teeth in her mouth, one pointed north and the other pointed south.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Ours was "Magdalena Hagdalena Ookataka Wakataka Okamokapoka was her name." Same scansion.

In addition to the teeth, she had two eyes in the middle of her head -- one was green, and the other one was red.

[carbonel]

In my version, she had two eyes at the the top of her head. And it was "Annaline Catalina." But I assumed that was the folk process at work, except for the traffic sign part.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

So why did yours have teeth pointing north and south, then? Or did she just have them and no one knew why? (Ours were indicated to be merge arrows.)

Also ours had a neck like a ten-foot pole, and right in the middle was a big black mole (the walk button); and she had two feet like a bathtub mat, nobody knows how they got like that.

[carbonel]

Yes, she had the teeth, but no one knew why. She also had two hairs on the top of her head, but I don't remember their properties.

I think your version is a result of someone trying to make sense of the nonsensical. It's not the standard version (based on a Google search, not on "my memories trump your memories," which they don't, of course).

I did my own contribution to the folk process when I realized that a one-verse song I knew scanned to the tune of "Boom Boom Ain't it Great to Be Crazy" and fit the theme. So I included it as a verse the next time I taught it. I don't know if they're still singing it that way, but it lasted quite a while.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I have never heard of this song in my life, and it sounds wonderful. I don't even know "Boom Boom Ain't It Great to Be Crazy." I'm clearly greatly deprived.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

If it doesn't frighten you too much, I suspect carbonel and I could sing "Boom Boom" for you next time we're in the same place with you.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

When I was on the small end of that, I was very stubborn (surprise!) and went running at two older kids.

For some reason, I thought it was cheating to pick on kids my own size. I always went for kids bigger than me, and yep, I usually got thrown to the ground.

I was thinking of "One day I met" "one day I met" "A great big bear" etc. I had forgotten "The Bear Went Over the Mountain" until just now. Dumb song. I've been trying to remember the words to "On top of Spaghetti," lately.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

"Out in the woods" "out in the woods" "Oh, way out there." Yep. I know that one, or some variation of it.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

"Red up the room" is Pennsylvania Dutch, I think. I've definitely heard that one used in rural Pennsylvania. I think it's usually spelled "redd." (Yes, look!" It's an official Pittsburgh slogan.)

We said prickers, baby doll, hot plate, casserole, and ally-ally-in-come-free. And as soon as you finished counting in hide-and-seek, you said "Apples, peaches, pumpkin pie - whoever's not ready, holler 'I'." If someone called back, you had to count for longer to give them time to hide - but it was a calculated risk for them, because hollering gave you a clue about where they were.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Redd, huh. Didn't know how it was spelled. Cool.

I'd forgotten about "Apples, peaches, pumpkin pie," but we did that too.

[mrsmodew.livejournal.com]

Where I grew up it was:
Duck, duck, goose. I do enjoy the occasional goose vs grey duck battles I have had since moving here to MN.

Trivet, baby doll, casserole, thorn bushes, ally, ally, oxen free.

I was good at sports so dodge ball was a blast. I didn't like red rover much because I had a hard time breaking through the line but I was great at being unbreakable. This made me a prime 'victim'.

This is Charmaine, from Minicon, btw.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Charmaine! Where'd you grow up? I thought you were from round here.

[mrsmodew.livejournal.com]

Nope, not a native Minnesotan though I try to blend in. I was born in Sacramento, CA. Lived there until age four. Spent most of a year in Cheyenne, WY then 5-12 in various cities in WA. I had 8 or 9 addresses there. 12-17 was in Phoenix, AZ (four or five different addresses) then 17-21 back in Sacramento. There was a 17 day stint in LV,NV in there and then we moved to Int'l Falls when I was 21 with the intention of ending up here in Minneapolis. We got down here not long before my 22 birthday.

Good god, I have been here a long time. Almost 14 years!

You could call me a gypsy of sorts. I have no plan of leaving here though. I am done with address changes. :)

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Duck, duck, goose is all I ever heard. They play it at Sarah's dance class, and somebody gave her an electronic version when she was too little to do more than just watch the lights.

I played Red Rover. Darned if I can remember what happened when you broke through. If someone didn't break through, they had to switch sides.

"Ally ally oxen, out are free" was our version.

"Hark, hark, the dogs do bark / when Gypsies come to town..." is the verse I know about. We always said, "Hark, hark, the dogs do bark / Somebody's walking a cat in the park." 'Cuz we wuz funny.

Sticker bushes. Trivet (hot plate was an electric burner you could cook on in a hotel room).

Heard "land o'Goshen" and "little green apples" (the last perhaps because of a sappy sixties song). Mom used to say "bright eyed and bushy tailed."

Dodge ball was always violent. They called it "sockem" at my school, and it was appropriate. It was like a holiday for bullies to throw as hard as they could at the victim class.

[carbonel]

I liked Red Rover, even though it was painful. I could hold tighter than my size would indicate -- I was probably seven or eight, because this was at Park District day camp.

"Redd up the cupboard" I remember seeing in Except for Me and Thee and The Friendly Persuasion by Jessamyn West.

I find the bear song awfully tedious, but I'll put up with one rendition of it. But no "Dem Bones".

[lydy.livejournal.com]

No "Dem Bones"? Oh, man! We never got to sing that at camp because it was blasphemous or something, and I hold it in high regard.

[carbonel]

Not only is it racist, deriving its humor, such as it is, from a broad black (slave) accent, but it's also sexist, blaming Eve for all of Adam's woes.

Also exceedingly repetitive, which is how I developed my initial distaste for it.

Words here:
http://www.musicanet.org/robokopp/usa/dembones.htm

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, and dodgeball was not at all painful for me, because my classmates could not throw. They mostly hit each other because the other people were running around, and blind luck followed. I would stand extremely still and let them miss around me. This drove the other kids crazy, but I was sick of them acting like I was useless in sports due to lack of skills when they had no skills either.

Demonstrating that what I lacked compared to them was enthusiasm was accurate but not all that socially popular. Oh well.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

A "trivet" is an insulating thing for protecting a table (or other surface) from hot dishes. A "hotplate" is an active heating device.

I think I remember hearing Red Rover explained as a child, and realizing instantly that it was terribly dangerous and refusing to have anything to do with it. I still have no idea how the limits of acceptable violence are set in actual instances of kids playing that kind of game.

I don't recall dodge ball being bad; the balls were fairly soft, much softer than a volleyball, and you could only get hit once per game anyway.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I didn't think dodge ball was at all a problem; I liked it. I watched the balls being thrown towards me, rarely got hit, and threw them back in my lameass "throws like a girl" way.

K.

On the Theory of Couple

[marsgov.livejournal.com]

For many years I too used "couple" to mean more than two and less than five; I've had to back off that usage in the face of widespread opposition.

But now that you've validated it...

Re: On the Theory of Couple

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

I've gotten more opposition from kids than adults on "couple" as "two or three." A few can start at four. Tell 'em I said it was okay.

Other questions: Dodgeball was gentler until middle school. Duck, duck, goose. Ollie ollie oxen free. Prickles or prickly bushes, among others (plants with thorns on them). Land o' Goshen was said only in books (though now I know several people who have visited or even lived in Goshen, IN). Not many barn doors in our suburb, though some of the homes used to be barns (after the farms were subdivided and houses built on the new lots). My mom used to say "Bright eyed and bushy tailed," but she was from Detroit.

[jiawen]

For me, the game was "Duck, Duck, Grey Duck", and we learned it as a color game. Every duck around the circle had to have a different color, so it went like this: "Green duck, orange duck, purple duck, yellow duck, GREY DUCK!" I don't remember what we did when we had more kids than ROYGBIV allowed... Maybe repeats were okay? I don't remember if we knew things like "puce", "crimson", "plaid" or whatever.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

What I don't get is how the game was played. I mean, with duck, duck, goose, you went around and bopped, with more or less gentleness, each kid in the circle, calling them a duck or a goose. When you finally chose a goose, you took off as fast as you can and, usually, beat them back to their place, sat down, and then they had to go around and bop people on the head. Of course, if you were me, you got tagged by the goose, and they got to resume their comfortable place on the ground, and you had to start all over again, but I ran very slowly. But as a color game, who ran where and why?

[jiawen]

I think it played almost exactly the same. The magic color was grey: that was the one that signaled "Stand up and run like crazy back to the same spot before the kid who called 'grey duck' beats you there!" The other colors didn't have any particular meaning other than forcing the kids to come up with X-2 number of colors if there were X number of kids sitting in the circle. (I have very little memory of this, but I think I remember that we couldn't say the same color twice.)

[mom23cats.livejournal.com]

Ever chant to an apple seed, "If you love me, pop and turn, if you hate me, sit and burn"? My grandmother taught me that.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

which grandmother was that? ours? I never heard that one.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

The other one, Daddy's mom. You probably never saw her kitchen. It was enormous with an old (spotless) gas stove in the middle with an unusually hot pilot. If you placed apple seeds on the stove, it was hot enough that the apple seeds would eventually pop like pop corn does. They'd leap right off the stove. Since Nannie's floor was quite literally clean enough to eat off of, we'd scramble after them and eat them. They tasted pretty good. She'd also bust open peach pits for us so that we could eat the middle bit, the part all full of cyanide.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

My dad (and my sibs and I, since we learned it from him) says "Rid up," to indicate the activity of tidying. Definitely not "red." He lived in Pittsburgh as a boy, before WWII, and not since.

A lot of the things you write about are things I've never even heard of, but others are equally familiar, since I moved to 3 different states in years when these things would have stuck.

I rarely hear people say, "rubber binders" any more, which is a bit of linguistic loss.

The great argument of this sort that entertained my family was, "all around the mulberry bush" vs "all around the cobbler's bench," when the conversation turned to monkeys chasing weasels. Wikipedia has more to say about this crucial topic. At least one more thorough analysis exists. It offers such depth of detail as this partial sentence," The silk weavers in question were descended from Protestant Hugenot refugees...." Readers will draw their own conclusions on why the Industrial Revolution was such a welcome onslaught on Western culture.

K. [the "more" in Wikipedia boils down to "standard variations"]

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Oh, excellent. I learned both, and I hadn't realized it until you pointed it out. Did you sing "Here we go 'round the mulberry bush"?

No one has admitted to the phrase "all round Robin Hood's barn." I've often wondered what Robin Hood was doing with a barn in the first place, what with living in the green wood with his forty merry men and all.

The first time I heard rubber binders was when I moved to Iowa and my ex-husband used the term. Took me a while to catch up. They'd always been rubber bands to me.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

My folks were from north Texas, and had the idioms to prove it, but my childhood was spent on military bases all over the world, so god only knows the source of this stuff:

"Duck, duck, goose," always. And "ally-ally-oxen-free," sans "out."

Dodgeball was never kind or gentle (especially to slow-moving fat girls who wore glasses - how many frames did I break by getting hit in the face with dodgeballs and volleyballs and other playful projectiles?) Nor were most of the other games we played (Red Rover, yes, and also Swinging Statues, wherein one kid took hold of another's arm and swung them around violently until the child playing It yelled "freeze," at which point you tried to keep from falling over.) Minor injuries were just part of playing, and nobody much minded - or, god forbid, cried. I doubt there was a day in my life between the ages of five and 12 or 13 when I wasn't sporting a BandAid, a scabby knee or a bright-orange stain of mercurochrome.

We chanted "Mary Mack, Mack, Mack all dressed in black, black, black, with silver buttons, buttons, buttons, all down her back, back, back ..." And "Cinderella dressed in yella/Went upstairs to meet her fella ..."

I heard "couldn't hit a barn door with a target painted on the side," as well as "couldn't pour pee out of a boot with the directions printed on the heel" and "so buck-toothed she could bite a punkin through a picket fence." And "pungle up," as in "pungle up the cash..."

And yay, robots, indeed. I got a Scooba for my birthday and my mostly hard-surfaced floors are the happier. I find it's also a very good cat exercise device. Living in the future is fun!

[davidschroth.livejournal.com]

Long Ago, in what now seems like another life, entirely, I worked in the library at Arizona State University. Among my duties was reshelving books, which exposed to to an apparently inexhaustible supply of interesting books I otherwise never would have encountered.

One of these books was about children's games and rhymes, and their variations across different locations. An entirely fascinating book, whose name I unfortunately do not remember, and I've never encountered it again :-( (I think the title had "A Rocket in my Pocket" somewhere in it, but after all these years, who knows?)

Growing up, it was "Ally, ally, ally, in come free". And I believe (but don't really remember) that it was neither "Duck, duck, goose" nor "Duck, duck, grey duck".

I don't remember dodge ball as being particularly painful - as someone else pointed out, the balls used in the game were pretty soft. On the other hand, tether ball, done incorrectly, could be extremely painful.

Since we *always* played Red Rover on a lawn, I don't recall any serious damage from it, either. But everyone who played was roughly the same size/age, which probably makes it less injury inducing.

[eileenlufkin.livejournal.com]

I was an overzealous Red Rover player; I'd fall down before I let go.
Painful hell; Duck, Duck, Gray Duck; Ally Ally in free, all out in free (I don't understand every else keeps dragging oxen into it; what do oxen have to do with hide and seek?); I don't remember. Sticker bush, maybe?; interchangeable; Hot pads were either bigger nicer looking versions of the same kind of quilted ones Mama used to take things out of oven, or they were ceramic tiles. Trivets were the metal ones with little feet. Mama's good heavy orange pot that could go on the burner or in the oven was a casserole. She made hotdish in it. I never heard anyone but Grandma, and these days me, say "all around Robin Hood's barn." It means the same thing as "taking the scenic route" only more so.

[boxofdelights]

(I don't understand every else keeps dragging oxen into it; what do oxen have to do with hide and seek?)

I think 'oxen' is just a change in pronunciation of 'outs in'.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I think Josepha Sherman edited a collection of kids' rhymes called Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts. It's interesting-- she didn't get northwest Illinois variations, or at least my versions weren't in there.