![]() 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. “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. Whee! 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. Hours of discussion, thought and PowerPoint expertise have been invested in this slide and, until you can track it down, it is worth exactly nothing.Īdmittedly, this is an extreme scenario, but, if you have spent any part of your career creating or delivering presentations, you have most likely had to deal with not being able to locate or access a slide you need.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. At this point, you are basically beating the bushes. You checked your email but there were so many versions of the presentation emailed to so many people, it’s not entirely clear which contains the final, perfect, blessed-by-upper-management version of the slide. These lesser versions are scattered, along with the version you need, among several presentation files that reside on at least four different laptops, one of which is now in in a bag under a seat on a plane flying in the vicinity of Kalamazoo. There are a handful of less perfect versions of the slide that lead up to the ultimate, perfect version. It makes the key point of your argument elegantly and convincingly. ![]() You and your team worked long and hard on creating the elusive perfect slide.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |