Bottle cap art. When I was…

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Bottle cap art. When I was younger, twist-off caps were just starting to be seen but no skelsie player would ever be caught dead using one. They were too, light, tall, whatever. They just weren’t used. Crimp-crown caps were the cap of choice. If fact, caps with a cork liner were prefered to those with the new-fangled plastic liner. The cork liner had to be dug out with a can opener or screw driver. If you were good (lucky) the liner would come out in one piece. The cap was then delicatly balanced on the burner of your stove (I think I was in my twenties before I saw an electric stove) and heated. Various pieces of wax crayons (Crayola, anything else was crap) were then added and allowed to melt. The skill was in selecting and mixing the colors to arrive at an eyepleasing design, something like a spin-art picture. Crayon added near the end remained the most vivid but the best caps were made by letting the melted crayon boil and convex. The cap was then taken off the heat and floated in a shallow pan of water to set the design. If the cap sunk you were left with a 3-D wax sculpture, pretty to look at but not playable. About two thirds of the time the colors would just run together. The resulting cap would be fine for playing but not much to look at. Every once in a while, though, you’d get a real work of art.

down down baby, down down…

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down down baby, down down the rollercoaster, sweet sweet baby, i’ll never let you go …a BISCUIT! shimmy shimmy coco puff, shimmy shimmy STOP!, shimmy shimmy coco puff with a cherry on TOP! hey foxy momma, i’ve got a boyfriend, ooo ooo baby, he’s cute as a BISCUIT! shimmy shimmy coco puff, shimmy shimmy STOP! shimmy shimmy coco puff with a cherry on TOP! its kind of random, but thats how we sang it at school.

ollie ollie oxen free …

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ollie ollie oxen free Dave Schreiber writes: What’s the meaning and origin of the phrase “ollie ollie oxen free”? I occasionally hear references to it as a phrase spoken by children, but I never used it or heard it when I was growing up (I was born in 1971 and grew up in San Jose, California). Ollie ollie oxen free is one of about a bajillion variants (I know–I counted) of a phrase used in various children’s games. As we have seen, children’s language and folklore hasn’t been as thoroughly studied as one would like, but in this case, researchers have tracked down a huge number of forms. The phrase is used in a variety of children’s chasing games, especially hide-and-(go-)seek. The rough form of this game is that a player (called “it”) gives other players a chance to hide, and then tries to find them. When “it” finds the first hider, he calls out some phrase indicating that the other players are “safe” to return “home,” at which point the person “it” found will succeed him as “it.” The original form of the phrase was something like all in free or all’s out come in free, both standing for something like all who are out can come in free. These phrases got modified to all-ee all-ee (all) in free or all-ee all-ee out(s) in free; the -ee is added, and the all is repeated, for audibility and rhythm. From here the number of variants takes off, and we start seeing folk etymologies in various forms. The most common of these has oxen replacing out(s) in, giving all-ee all-ee oxen free; with the all-ee reinterpreted as the name Ollie, we arrive at your phrase, which, according to the Dictionary of American Regional English, is especially common in California. Norwegian settlement areas have Ole Ole Olsen’s free. For the out(s) in phrase, we also see ocean, oxford, ax in, awk in, and even oops all in. This multiplicity of examples demonstrates the unsurprising fact that young children often have little idea what phrases like this mean, and transmute them into variants that involve more familiar terms, losing the original meaning in the process. It’s difficult to determine early dates for these expressions–most of them weren’t collected until the 1950s and later–but based on recollections of the games, it seems that they were in common use by the 1920s, and probably earlier (home free is found in print in the 1890s, and the game hide-and-seek is at least four centuries old).

I have great memories of…

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I have great memories of marathon hide-and-go-seek games in my neighborhood in southern California. I have a question, perhaps a bit offbeat. I have a passionate interest in languages and terminology, and that prompts me to ask: what is the origin of that strange phrase used in this game to bring all players (for whatever reason) out of their hiding places at once? I’m referring to the one that sounds to my ears like “Allie allie oxen free.” Oxen?? Referring to the animal? Seems unlikely. My best guess is that the meaning is: All _____ are free to come in without becoming “it” or befalling some other “penalty.” But what really goes in the blank and what is its origin?

I remember playing in the…

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I remember playing in the middle of the street in Queens (one kid had to watch for the cars) in the late 50’s and early 60’s. We would wait for the macadam in the street to get soft from the heat and then we would make a permanent skelsies board in the street.