posted
I think you spelled "ollie" better then me, BUT I always shouted "in-come-free" to let other players know they are free to come in and not get out or tagged.
posted
Those ancient sayings - especially children's sayings - are always hard to trace, and usually the explanations are 'JUST-SO' stories invented long after the fact.
It might be that "in come free" is the older version, and it degenerated to "oxen free" just because kids don't always hear what's being said.
But it's just as possible that the cry "olly olly oxen free" originated as a warning through a rural neighborhood that oxen had gotten loose, and everybody would gather to hunt them down and bring them back. Loose sheep are a problem, but loose oxen are potentially dangerous; also, oxen were more likely to be owned by a village as a whole or at least relied on by the whole village to help with the tillage of their fields.
So when children played hide and seek, they might have used an existing "gathering cry" to signal that the game was over and everybody should come in.
Or not. Who knows?
Posts: 2005 | Registered: Jul 1999
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posted
Hmmm... But wouldnt it then drive everybody crazy when the kids played hide and seek? All the villagers rushing out to the call of "ollie ollie oxen free", searching desperatly for thier oxen, only to learn it was little Tommy and Jojo playing again. I dont know. Sounds annoying to me.
Posts: 499 | Registered: Mar 2004
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posted
Random House word of the day has an interesting article on the origins of the phrase
quote: The phrase is used in a variety of children's chasing games, especially hide-and-(go-)seek...
The original form of the phrase was something like all in free or all's out come in free, both standing for something like all who are out can come in free. These phrases got modified to all-ee all-ee (all) in free or all-ee all-ee out(s) in free; the -ee is added, and the all is repeated, for audibility and rhythm.
From here the number of variants takes off, and we start seeing folk etymologies in various forms. The most common of these has oxen replacing out(s) in, giving all-ee all-ee oxen free; with the all-ee reinterpreted as the name Ollie, we arrive at your phrase, which, according to the Dictionary of American Regional English, is especially common in California. Norwegian settlement areas have Ole Ole Olsen's free. For the out(s) in phrase, we also see ocean, oxford, ax in, awk in, and even oops all in.
posted
Nope, not related. Neither are many of the other people with low member numbers, actually. If dmichael had been just a tiny bit less asinine, OSC would have joined the forum long before I did. As it was, though, I had to sign up to rebut some ridiculous and offensive thing that he'd said, and didn't waste any time doing so.
Of course, then I chickened out and didn't respond, as I recall, but still--it got me to register.
I'm better known here by my later handle, Noemon, by the way.
Posts: 1087 | Registered: Jul 1999
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posted
I always figured it had its roots in French somehow. Like Allez allez aux en something.
Know where I got that idea from? OSC's story "The Originist" where he talks about the origins of nursery rhymes.
Posts: 5957 | Registered: Oct 2001
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posted
afr, I was thinking of the "Ring around the rosy/Wrinkly Grandma Posey" bit from "The Originist," as well. Posts: 4077 | Registered: Jun 2003
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posted
Reason: The first two-hundred or so people were imported from an earlier version of the board. Their numbers were allotted alphabetically. Other people joined later. The ones who were imported have no join date, just: A Long Time Ago!
posted
What if we've forgotten the passwords to our old name and no longer have the email address it was registered to? Not that I have a account that old, but my obsession with piddling minutia at least allows us to assume that these people didn't leave the forum.
Posts: 7 | Registered: Sep 2004
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