Playground phrases

[jenky]

I remember when playing tig, you would say "can't tig your butcher". Does anyone know where it came from?

[Shipstabber]

We used to say 'can't TICK your butcher', and it means that, in a game of ticky it you can't 'get' the person who has just 'got' you.

[jenky]

So the Butcher bit is the same - What I was wondering is why we said it. Why Butcher?

[New Forester]

I used to call it tag...

 

We didn't have the "butcher" rule, but it suggests that the "tag" in some way represents slaughter, so the tagger is therefore a butcher.  It must be making a game of the situation where, for example, the butcher is catching the turkeys one by one.  I'd not thought of it as so bloodthirsty!

 < /P>

Lots of games do have violence at their heart though.  Chess is of course a battle game, as are all team sports of the line-up-against-each-other kind, like tennis, soccer, hockey, rugger, beach volleyball et c.

 

Cricket, baseball and so on (like the chessboard game of fox-and-geese)  are "hunting" games, where one group is "attacking" one person at a time. 

 

The only other kinds of games I can think of at the moment are target-practice games, like darts, golf or archery, then racing, and searching games, like minesweeper or sardines.  Each also related to hunting, of course.