I seem to recall ‘ollie ollie entry,’ while my father told me he used ‘oxen free.’ I’m surprised to see no mention of ‘new cucumber’ here. But I’m sure that soon we’ll have an app to replace that. Kids grew up, but the ancient river of childhood flowed on to greet each new generation. The anarchic play of unsupervised kids was, in a real sense, steeped in the culture, from chivalry to superstition, of their great-great-great-and-beyond-grandparents. You don’t have to be a geezer to see that the loss of the native culture of childhood to cable TV, videogames and their ilk represents the severing of a irreplaceable link between everyday life today and life centuries ago. Sadly, I should probably say “was,” because that form was documented by the Dictionary of American Regional English back in the 1960s. In areas of the Midwest settled by immigrants from Norway, for instance, one popular form is “Ole Ole Olsen’s free.” Of course, many British customs have jumped the pond to the US and Canada, and “Ollie ollie oxen free” is well known in America, often with regional variations. The “Ollie” of “Ollie ollie oxen free” is almost certainly the “All ye” reshaped to take the form of “Ollie,” short for the proper name “Oliver.” The “oxen” is classic folk etymology, where a word or words that sound unfamiliar to the listener (“come in,” in this case), especially when slurred, are given the form of a more familiar word (“oxen”). This was probably something like “All’s out come in free” or “All ye out come in free,” meaning that anyone still hiding (“out”) can now come back into the group without fear (“free”) of being tagged “It.” Since the game “Hide and Seek” itself is at least four centuries old, there’s been plenty of time for that original phrase to be filtered through small ears clogged with dirt and come out almost unrecognizable. In the case of “Ollie ollie oxen free” and its many variants, we have a mutated form of the original “all clear” signal. Today, as we say today, probably not so much. Thus childhood, at the time the Opies studied it, had become a linguistic museum of British history. For instance, a child in 20th century England would say “barley” to gain temporary respite from a schoolyard fight, a term that comes from the custom of Medieval knights offering their opponent the opportunity to “parley” or “parlez” (French for “talk”), i.e., ask for mercy. What they found was a rich culture that in some cases dated back to the Middle Ages and originated in adult customs at that time. The Opies studied and interviewed children in England, Scotland and Ireland just after World War II, meticulously documenting the customs and vocabulary of their rituals, games, and traditions. OXENFREE GAME FREQUENCY 60.8 CODE“Ollie ollie oxen free” is part of what Iona and Peter Opie, in their wonderful book “The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren” (Oxford University Press, 1959), called “the code of oral legislation” among children. So the “Ollie” shout is really from Hide and Seek, not Tag. “Ollie ollie oxen free” is traditionally shouted at this point by the old “It” to let the other players know that they should emerge from their hiding places and start the game over. It’s when “It” finds one of the hiders, of course, that the found child becomes “It” and the game restarts. I was never a big fan of playing “Tag” because I was a small, weedy child and consequently spent a disproportionate amount of time being “It.” “Hide and Seek,” where children hide from the child designated “It,” at least gave me the opportunity to get some reading done behind the couch. “Refudiate” won the “Most Unnecessary” category hands down. Runners-up included “nom” (“Onomatopoetic form connoting eating, especially pleasurably”), “junk” in a number of senses, “Wikileaks,” and “trend” as a verb. OXENFREE GAME FREQUENCY 60.8 SOFTWAREWhee! Incidentally, the American Dialect Society (ADS), the linguists and scholars who study and document American English as it is actually spoken, voted at their annual meeting this month to declare “app” (short for “application,” a software program that runs on a computer, telephone, etc.) as the ADS Word of the Year for 2010. No, with this “app,” you just point your phone’s camera at the puzzle and it uses artificial intelligence to solve it for you. You’ll notice that I didn’t say for “playing” Sudoku. Isn’t there an iPhone app for that now? Apparently there’s now one for solving Sudoku puzzles. Dear Word Detective: Don’t know if I’m spelling this correctly, but I’d like to know the origin of the “Ollie, Ollie, Oxen Free” shouted by children playing the ancient game of tag.
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