You’re right, Jill! We DID forget to provide a link again, didn’t we?
:hangs head in shame:
When all else fails, ask Cecil.
In early 60’s suburban LA, this phrase had mutated to “olly olly oxen free-free-free”, which of course makes no literal sense at all. Probably derived from “olly olly outs in, free-free-free”.
TT
“It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.”
–James Thurber
Perhaps you should avoid the mysterious, and consider the obvious source of this statement.
The phrase you are discussing has been used in hide-and-seek games like kick the can for generations. Enough generations, apparently, that mispronunciation has turned it into gibberish.
When kids of yore thought they won their game, or had to go home, they
would signal this by shouting, “All ye, all ye out is in free.” This was
plain English that could be clearly understood from behind bushes and under
porches. If you say it out loud you can hear its similarity to the
current pronunciation of “ollie ollie oxen free,” but the words themselves just sort of dissolved over the centuries.
Sageous
“allee allee olsen gee, everybody tagged is free.”
sounds an awful lot like:
“aller, aller, alons y.
Everybody tagged is free”
Given how much French made it into the English language, it doesn’t seem that unbelievable that a schoolyard rhyme would have the first verse in French, and the second in English.
I remember my mom telling me “aller! aller!, alons y” when I lagged behind on family outings. She used the exact same words - the spelling I’m not too certain on, however.
Hide & seek and the words that call in the successful may indeed go back many hundreds of years, perhaps even to the time that the English language coalesced.
But not all children’s games turn into gibberish over time, especially when placed in rhyme or song. Consider:
Ring a round the rosey,
A pocket full of posies,
Ashes, ashes,
We all fall down.
It is a song about the bubonic plague.
Line 1 refers to the initial marks on the skin from the infection,
Line 2 refers to the practice of carrying flowers in your pocket to cover the stench as the disease created rather smelly distensions in the lymph glands in the groin and armpits.
Line 3 refers either to the onset of pneumonia (Achoo! Achoo!) or the line from the Christian burial service…“ashes to ashes”
Line 4 (and the act of falling) refers to the sudden onset of death which often did occur while people were walking about.
That would be “Allez! Allez! Allons-y!” That could also be a valid origin, since “Allez” is very close to “Ollie.” Good one, Kyberneticist!
Sorry, but I have to disagree, because those aren’t the lyrics I learned. The version I learned growing up in Iowa in the 60’s was:
I have also heard versions where the first line is “Ringer, ringer rosey”.
I don’t think any song or story that is largely passed on orally will fail to be embelished or changed.
“The truth does not make a good story; that’s why we have art.”
I heard the correct version as a child.
Sounds like someone in Iowa got it confused with:
Jack and Jill, went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water,
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.
A Rhyme and a Reason covers the origins of many of these rhymes (such as the Jack and Jill one) http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/3041/jill.html http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/3041/
Normally rhymes are fairly easy to remember. If in fact “olee olee” was French, however, I can see it being rapidly corrupted by incomprehending schoolchildren in later years.
I dunno… I’m still having trouble imagining little kids picking up on a shout that includes “all ye” or “oyez.”
And wasn’t the Ring Around the Rosie" thing discredited in another thread?
“The dawn of a new era is felt and not measured.” Walter Lord
Cecil wrote a column on Olly Olly Oxen Free about ten years ago, and it didn’t get into the books, so it isn’t in the archives here. He says he’s gonna find it and post it on the cite.
Jill
Here’s the link to Cecil’s old Olly Olly Oxen free column. http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a900622a.html
JillGat, what it is to know friends in high places! Did you make Cecil go on all fours in the crawl space under the roof to get this?
Yup, that’s a big UL, that the rhyme came from the bubonic plague. There is no evidence to support that claim. It appears to be a much later rhyme. For more info, go to http://www.snopes.com
I read years ago that ollie, ollie oxen free is from german: alle, alle, something or other I don’t remember, because I don’t speak german. I’m not sure but I think the book was ‘The Dictionary of Misinformation’
by Tom Burnam. Maybe someone can look that one up cause now I’m curious. The explanation was plausable and seemed to fit many of the variations in use.
Zrocks has hit on my favorite pet theory on this subject:
I’ve believed for twenty years now, without ever making any real effort to research it, that it’s a corruption of a German (or possibly Dutch or Frisian) phrase, roughly:
Meaning, “Everybody, everybody, everybody’s free”.
This has the advantage of being quite close phonetically to the commoner variations reported (the “s” in “sind” being pronounced rather more like an English “z” than the more sibilant “s” sound", and the “a” in “alle” being pronounced nearly identically to the “o” in “ollie”. The greatest discrepancy would be the short rather than long “e” sound at the end of “alle” as opposed to “ollie”, and “frei” being pronounced like the English word “fry” rather than “free”. These distinctions are not so (you should pardon the expression) pronounced that they couldn’t have easily arisen from several generations of kids mis-hearing and mispronouncing the sounds involved. Also arguing in favor of this theory is that no metaphorical or otherwise reaching interpretation is required to explain the origin of the phrase – it says exactly what it means in the game, with the addition only of a little repetition (“Alle, alle, alle sind . . .”), common enough in chants associated with kid’s games.
“Ain’t no man can avoid being born average, but there ain’t no man got to be common.” –Satchel Paige
Somewhere in Cecils answer to the query the word spuggy is mentioned.
Could this be my moment?
Spuggy is a regional colloquialism in Northern England- it’s a SPARROW.
Yes I know it’s off the point but could you resist filling a hole in Cecils knowledge?
But maybe he was playing games and knew it all along.
As a child in Austria I learned to use “Alle, Alle, In komm frei” As far as I know it translates to what you’d expect (everybody, everybody, come in free) and it seems to be the only version I’ve heard of that’s gramatically correct, and not gibberish.
there was Ally ally in free! in my town in northern Ontario in Canada
but there was also “Monkey Monkey in a tree if you come out you’ll be free!”
and yes, we called it hide and GO seek…
Ive noticed some Canadian phrases are like Southern ones…
Any thoughts?
Rats! I’m spreading Urban Legends…
The site for debunking the story that the children’s rhyme “Ring Around the Rosey” refers to bubonic plague is at:
http:\www.ualberta.ca~imunro/ring.html
There, folklorists Ian Munro and Philip Hiscock note that the plague interpretation dates back to 1961’s “The Plague & the Fire” by James Leasor. Leasor never stated from where he got his interpretation.
The rhyme itself first appeared in Kate Greenaway’s “Mother Goose” published in 1881 (in the UK). It’s first U.S. appearence is in 1883 in William Newell’s “Games & Songs of American Children”. Newell claims (but does note cite) that the rhyme dates from the 1790’s. While Greenaway’s (a famous Victorian illustrator and children’s author) version is close to our modern version - “hush, hush, hush, hush” instead of “ashes, ashes”, Newell’s version is quite different.
Munroe and Hiscock argue that the distance in time between that last plague outbreak (1665) and publication argue against the plague interpretation. Someone would have written it down somewhere. They believe that this nonsense song has more to do with the obvious - a ring dance, common in Western Europe for centuries, with nonsense lyrics.
On the other hand:
Monroe & Hiscock argue that folklorists have been collecting children’s rhymes for centuries. How did they miss ring around the rosey until the 1880’s?
Unfortunately, Greenaway and Newell (and others) were not folklore scholars but were just trying to sell books. (Greenaway didn’t write this rhyme. If she had she would have included it in her earlier books. Her “Mother Goose” noted that these were old children’s rhymes that she collected.) The fact that the rhyme was current in both the U.S. and Britain in the 19th century indicates that it may have a lineage back at least into the pre-American Revolutionary period.
Munroe & Hiscock argue that Protestant bans on dancing in the 19th century (in both Britain & the U.S.) led to adolescent and toddler “play parties” in which circle dances were common and from these dances came “ring around the rosie.”
Maybe. Dances were banned in Britain and in parts of the American colonies under the Commonwealth era when the Cromwell dictatorship banned all entertainment - including plays, Christmas celebrations and such circle dances as “dancing round the maypole.”
But when the Cromwell dictatorship ended in 1658-59 most Britains and Americans resumed dancing. (Only Puritan New England and certain small sects in Britain maintained these entertainment bans into the 18th and 19th centuries.) Of course, the plague that Leasor refers to took place in 1665.
So, while it seems that the evidence is strongly against the plague explanation, its not inconceivable. Nor does an oral history interpretation need validation through publication.
The plague interpretation is very common, my cite is from National Geographic, March 1999, “The Great Plague.”
I leave it to Cecil, or Ed, or Jill, or Melin or the teaming 5,400, or whomever…
While learning French, I was told by someone who was further down the road in learning the language (i.e., unquestionably reliable and knowledgeable source) that the famous hide-and-go-seek saying came a long time ago from the French, I think from maybe the First World War if I recall, who when clearing out of a place would say: “Allez, Allez, On s’en fuit.” (The last word I can’t remember the correct conjugation, s’en fruire, I think, but it means to take off from a place.) Rough translation: “Go/Take off/Get out of here! Everyone is taking off!”