I know this is going back a long way but I came across the archived article about the variations of the above phrase, used when playing hide and seek. Cecil mentions an English phrase along the lines of “all in, all in, spuggy in the tin”, commenting that you probably don’t want to know what ‘spuggy’ is.
In my native northeast England, geordies (people from around Newcastle, basically) use the term to refer to pigeons. I remember a kids show based on a character known as Spuggy because he raised racing/homing pigeons. While I don’t remember the term being used in hide and seek, presumably it means one of the players has come back, much like a homing pigeon (the tin reference is a bit confusing, as I recall the birds being transported in baskets, but presumably it’s just for the rhyming value)
I left the UK 17 years ago, so it’s possible the ol’ memory is playing tricks. My main rationale comes down to the TV program I mentioned, an entire series (possibly one of those ones where the episode pauses while you read along with the narrator recapping the story so far, all the rage when i was at school) devoted to some stereotypical working class kid whose plucky battler of a pigeon got nicked/poisoned/brainwashed/recruited by the Tories and his attempts to win some big pigeon race.
Growing up in Washington, I also recall that many of the kids were fascinated by geordie slang and one of the girls in my class got nicknamed Spuggy–but she was a skinny little thing which may support your sparrow reference…
I’m a bit north of Geordieland here, but we have the word “speug” (pronounced like “Spyug”, and use it to mean sparrow. Which is not to stop you from using it for a pigeon, of course.
Well, I’ve got to express my relief that it isn’t an invitation for all of the players to return to the base and spit into a coffee can the little nippers have set up.
I would actually like to know where the term ‘oxen’ came in. I used to live in Switzerland and speak German and from what I gather the term was ‘alle, alle auch sind frei’, which basically meant ‘everyone is free’. A term someone would say at the end of a game of hide-and-seek if they couldn’t find all the participants and were giving up. Where the term Spuggy came from, I can’t even begin to guess.
I live in the South of England, only about 250 miles from Newcastle. I have never heard of ‘spuggy’.
We call pigeons ‘flying rats’, presumably because they poop on Nelson’s Column. :eek:
And in Norf Lunnon, we say ‘sparra’ for sparrow.
Is it too simplistic to suggest that an English-omly speaker heard German kids saying ‘alle, alle **auch sind ** frei’ and ‘translated’ it into Olly, olly, oxen free’? Phonetically it sounds OK.
The Persian for chariot is ‘rukh’ and ‘Shah mat’ means the king is dead.
In English chess terms we use ‘rook’ and ‘checkmate’.
Same process?
It’s always an intersting debate figuring out where the common phrases and such came from. I wonder if there is a discipline for this tucked neatly away in academia somewhere? It certainly would be intersting.
A bit OT, but I remember when I was younger hearing that the rhyme “Ring around the rosies” was about the plague. This was actually debunked as it did not appear until about 500 years after the plague ravaged Europe.
