Howway...

[venta]

A quick survey about junior school games, for those who can remember that far back.

Yesterday, with half an eye on the rugby, I commented that parts of it were pretty much indistinguishable from an extended game of Pile On.

The basic principle of which is, you push someone over, shout "Pile On!" and then pile as many people on them as possible. onebyone fixed me with his special "you're a weird Northerner" gaze, and told me that the game was, and always has been, called Bundle.

Any offers? I suspect I may be relying on jiggery_pokery to back me up here.

My mum agrees that it was definitely Pile On in her day, my dad appears to have gone to too refined a school to do such things. They did comment, however, on there being a big regional variation on what you say when you're playing some game like Tiggy[*] and for some reason, such as injury, require not to be tiggable for a while.

Round our way saying "kings" (and crossing your fingers) rendered you untouchable... for a while. Anyone suspected of overusing it probably got Piled On. I'm sure someone's probably done proper etymological research into all this, but how could it possibly be better than the answers of a self-selecting LJ readership?

[*] or Tag, if you're a southern jessy.

Oh, and my Designated Hero for the Week (DHW) this week is also onebyone. Though I'm ashamed to admit I've completely forgotten why. I quite like the idea of a DHW, I shall try and keep it up.

Comments

Why aye

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Afraid that I was always one of the quiet kids who kept out of the way of such games, lest I ended up as stooge. :-) The phrase "all pile on" certainly rings bells in this context, however.

I've also got a strange and almost monotonous junior school chant running through my head at this point: "All join on if you want to play <game name>. No girls allowed{, except optional list}." Mmm... maybe that was infant school, not junior school.

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

Interestingly in Clwyd I think we would have called it "Tig", probably indicating that we're a weird no-man's-land spurned by both Northerners and Southerners as inferiors.

I like the idea of a DHW. I take it that the title isn't actually an honorific based on actual actions, but rather implies that, in the event that a hero is needed, it'll be onebyone who has to step into the breach (and sacrifice his life if necessary)?

Games

[davefish.livejournal.com]

Pile on was played a lot around our way. Once even with a teacher, though that was somewhat accidental, and the teacher was most unimpressed with it.

What you foolishly call Tiggy is of course chasing.

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

We didn't have anything resembling this strange 'pile on' thing, which seems to me to bear no resemblance to an actual game. We had things like Red Rover and British Bulldog.

Also, where I lived it was 'It'. 'Tag' to us was what posh people said in the 50s. That having been said, we did use 'pax' where you used 'kings', although we had no idea what it meant, it was just another meaningless kid-word.

I went to public school, you know.

Kiss chase

[leathellin.livejournal.com]

Surely other people ended up playing kiss chase - voluntarily or otherwise...

Pile On!

[cardinalsin.livejournal.com]

Its called Pile On.

So true is the above statement that Games Workshop's Blood Bowl game has a skill named after it (Piling On), used to squash opponents into splutchy pancakes.

Defence rests.