There is a long story on the actor’s commentary track on The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings about how Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan (Merry and Pippen) played this pratical joke on Elijah Wood (Frodo). Apparently on one of the first days of shooting on location one them tagged the other and said Tig. They started tagging each other and saying Tig or Tag when they did it. Just joking around. Wood asked them what they were playing and they proceeded to make up a huge number of rules for the game of Tig. They freely admit that they knew of no such game, they were just pulling Elijah’s leg.
Apparently he bought it hook line and sinker and well over a year later he asked why they never played Tig again.
I’m from California and it’s always been tag. “It” makes sense because when you tag someone, you say, “You’re it!” I played a game at school once called “It” which was different from tag. I think it was like tag, except EVERYONE was it. I don’t remember exactly how it worked.
“TIG” in Glasgow (West Central Scotland. Also known as “tig” to my sis-in-law from the east of Scotland. As a child, I only ever encountered “tag” in storybooks set in England.
It might also, occasionally, have been known as “chases”, now I think of it, but cetainly it was normally “tig”.
Is the word “tig” ever used in any other context? Here in the U.S., in a baseball game, a runner can be “tagged” with the ball, producing an out. Would you use “tag” or “tig” in this context?
Growing up in Chicago, it was known as both “tag” and “it.”
To add to the discussion, though, I’m curious what rules and regional variations there are in this game.
Simple tag, where one person was It, and everyone had to run away from It. Upon being tagged, being It would transfer to the person tagged.
Freeze tag. Teams of people It and Not It would scurry about. Any Non-It tagged by an It would have to freeze. If a Frozen Non-It is tagged by another Non-It, then they are unfrozen.
In both these variations, there are also subvariations which include a “glue.” A Glue is any object (say, a tree or a fence), or a geographical designation (say, behind a certain white line), where somebody who is Not It can hang around without fear of being tagged.
Furthermore, in these “glue” variations, there was yet another variation which allowed linking (I think we called it “electric fencing,” but I may just be making that up.) In this variation, anyone who is on glue, can link with another person to extend that glue. For example, if glue is a tree and player A is touching the tree, then if player A holds hands with player B, who holds hands with player C, then the entire chain of players is considered glue, as long as the originating link is touching glue.
I remember one variant of freeze tag where to unfreeze a frozen player, you had to crawl between his legs. This added some spunk because it left you vulnerable.
Also, I’ve used a “glue” before, but we called it a “base”.
Yet another Kiwi here. Where I grew up (Napier - east coast of the middle of the North Island), it was known exclusively as ‘tag’. In fact, this thread was the first time I’ve heard of it being called anything else.
One oddity of my primary school was that the tagged person was never ‘it’ - he/she was ‘in’. I’ve never heard of this being used anywhere else, which leads me to believe that my primary school was composed primarily of freaks. One upside of this terminology is this rather clever rhyme:
“<person’s name>'s in! <person’s name>'s in! <person’s name>'s in the rubbish bin! Eating bogeys, eating snot…<person’s name>'s got a hairy cock!”
where a ‘bogey’ is equivalent to an American ‘booger’.
One house rule that seems to be very common is the inability to tag your ‘master’ (the person who originally tagged you).
Another house rule we used involved ‘taking the tag off’ the tagged person. This meant that any sort of contact transferred the tag - whether it was an intentional tag or someone accidentally brushing past the tagged person. So if you’re being chased by the tagged person and you turn around and punch him in the face, you’d be in. You’d also be in big trouble with the teachers.
Also there was flashlight tag, which was played in the dark, with a flashlight. Usually outside.
“It” would run around with a flashlight (IOW, everyone could see where he was, but he couldnt see anyone else) until he spotted someone. The caught person would become “It” (or sometimes would just go to jail until everyone ended up in jail).
[American] Midwesterner here, we did that… but when batteries failed it was Kick the Can… a giant game of (yes) TAG… the “It” would have to go around finding people hiding throughout the neighborhood… when tagged, the person would go to “jail”, the area around the spare pop can we had placed in a middle neighborhood zone. If a non-it person could get by the “It” and kick the can over, they would call out some crazy phrase… (olly olly oxen free) and all the “prisoners” would be free to run and hide again.
Twas how I spent many summers. In “prison”, that is. :smack:
I remember some variants on tig(gy) I used to play.
One variant had a series of rounds. In each round, one person was ‘it’, and the rest stood on one of two walls that faced each other. The walls were safe, but the people not
‘it’ (or possibly ‘on’, but I’m not sure on that, I’ll just use ‘it’ for convienience), had to run between the walls, and weren’t safe until they they reached the other wall, so whoever is on could ‘tig’ them. You didn’t have to run between walls constantly, but were expected not to stay on one wall for ever.
The twist is that whoever is ‘it’ stays it, but if they tig someone the person tigged becomes it too, until eventually everyone is it, then you start again.
Also, we played a variant with bases, or glue (it might have been called a base, but I can’t really remember), that you could only stay on for a short time, and I think you couldn’t go back straight away.
Also, the not tagging your master rule was called ‘no tiggy butcher’, when I was growing up, if I recall correctly.
We’ve been married two years and I am just now finding this out?