Why do we all know how to play MASH?

April 1, 2005 8:59 AM

I was talking with several of my friends the other day that all grew up in different parts of the country - it seems we all knew some childhood games, but it's not like they were on TV or anything.

Why is that kids seem to know how to play MASH, those hand clapping games with rhymes (which I could have recited to you when I was eight, but nowadays...not so much), making fortune tellers, et al.? Everyone I have talked to said they learned from a friend of a brother of a cousin or whatever. Is there that well of a social network of kids? Has any research ever been done on this field?

posted by Hot Like Your 12V Wire to Society & Culture (16 answers total)

The answer is a question: How do you all speak English?
posted by Mo Nickels at 9:04 AM on April 1, 2005

Children have an oral culture of games and rhymes and the like. You'd be amazed to hear some of the historical origins of some of these games and rhymes. "Ring Around the Rosy" dates from the plague.

Yes, it has been studied. A couple named Iona and Peter Opie made a career out of this field. They began their research together in 1944 and are generally considered the foremost experts in this field (Peter is now dead but Iona is still alive and working as far as I know). Among their books are The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, The Classic Fairy Tales, and Children's Game in Street and Playground.
posted by orange swan at 10:37 AM on April 1, 2005

I was completely fascinated by this topic when I was a child in grade school (early to mid 80s). Jokes also fit into this, as new ones never seemed new really, but just new to the geographic area. For the most part, most of the games and jokes and what not came from other kids (pointing to the social network), from TV (Sesame Street, etc.), or from our parents.

The social network aspect at first boogles the mind but it makes more sense if you fit in stuff like cousins from different areas forced together for a family event of some kind, siblings (and particularly "step" siblings, etc.), and also consider how observant children really are: anytime their in a new area they take EVERYTHING in, so they may be at a company mixer, day care, summer camp, brownies or cub scouts, etc.., and end up playing with kids from other areas and they teach each other what they know.

Now bring in the school aspect, where every child is going through at least some of the events mentioned above and sharing it all with the 30 kids in a class, at a school of 500 (or whatever). A lot of the games and what not were usually group games too, ensuring that one child was teaching 10s of others. With that sort of rate of expansion combined with the links above, information must propogate fairly quickly.
posted by jwells at 10:42 AM on April 1, 2005

I find this fascinating too. It's as if there was a national convention of first-graders where a representative from each grade school traveled somewhere to learn "Miss Mary Mack," "Say Say Oh Playmate" and "Duck Duck Grey Duck" (the Minnesota version of what the rest of y'all call Duck Duck Goose). Then they came back and spread it to their playground, then they told two friends, and so on, and so on.
posted by GaelFC at 10:47 AM on April 1, 2005

"Ring Around the Rosie" isn't really about the plague.
posted by words1 at 11:03 AM on April 1, 2005

Of course, these days I suppose kids can just google for games... MASH, which I'd completely forgotten about.
posted by jwells at 11:06 AM on April 1, 2005

Sorry, but "Ring Around the Rosy isn't about/from the plague". On preview, um, yeah, what they said.

The different subsets of children's oral history are amazing in their complexity. Besides playground games and jokes, there are the scare/legend/magic things (Bloody Mary, light-as-a-feather, stiff-as-a-board) and the urban mythos shared by homeless children.

(My mother, who is seventy, was surprised to hear that "the girls still do Bloody Mary at sleepovers?!")
posted by desuetude at 11:31 AM on April 1, 2005

Also, a lot of times as kids we found that we thought we were talking about the same game, but were really talking about completely different concepts with the same name. Foursquare springs to mind, and that one is probably spread largely because (like hopscotch) schools around the world paint the foursquare design on playground concrete for kids to play on.
Ball-rush is one that isn't based on school playground designs, but still encompasses a myriad of games, some which don't involve balls, some which do, (though most of which involve rushing :-)
posted by -harlequin- at 12:24 PM on April 1, 2005

Actualy, most culture is transfered not from adults to children, but rather from older children to younger children. Most social norms are transfered in this way.
posted by delmoi at 1:00 PM on April 1, 2005

It's as if there was a national convention of first-graders where a representative from each grade school traveled somewhere to learn "Miss Mary Mack," "Say Say Oh Playmate" and "Duck Duck Grey Duck" (the Minnesota version of what the rest of y'all call Duck Duck Goose). Then they came back and spread it to their playground, then they told two friends, and so on, and so on.

I think the kids who move around a lot play a big part in forming this virtual convention. Remember the "new kids" that arrived in your school. I distinctly remember that they always had some strange but interesting foreign customs to teach us all.
posted by vacapinta at 1:28 PM on April 1, 2005

I studied this a bit, there are tiny variations in the clapping game songs from east to west coast, and I found that girls in big big cities had toughened up the songs ( instead of shimmy shimmy cocoa pop, they'd say "just because I kissed you doesn't mean I love you"). Seemed to be all oral tradition, someone teaches you and you teach someone and so on. I met some girls who weren't "popular" as kids and they only knew Bubblegum, because anyone with two fists could play without learning any rules and such. Hmm.
posted by mrs.pants at 1:38 PM on April 1, 2005

This is fascinating to me as well. It almost inspires me to gather a list to put online.

Thanks for the mash link, jwells! Someone needs to make an internet version.
posted by mileena at 2:11 PM on April 1, 2005

You'll find there's already a lot of scholarship on this topic. Here's an excellent book by folklorist Simon Bronner: American Children's Folklore. Fun for the layperson. Here's an excellent overview in outline form. And on reflection, the network that children's oral culture creates is really no different than that by which adult urban legends and topical jokes normally spread. Adults, though, tend to transfer their folklore from person to person within occupational networks, for obvious reasons. So think about all the jargon and all the jokes you can share with someone who is engaged in the same profession that you are -- even if they're on the opposite side of the country; even if they speak another language. The experience of childhood is quite consistent from place to place, and in a sense, childhood is a child's occupation.
posted by Miko at 2:19 PM on April 1, 2005

Thanks for the mash link, jwells! Someone needs to make an internet version.

They did.
posted by Miko at 2:49 PM on April 1, 2005

Actually, it's just not in the (presumably) U.S. I was amazed to learn my husband played some of the games I did when growing up. He's Canadian and grew up in rural northern Ontario. I'm American and grew up in Southern California.
posted by deborah at 10:03 AM on April 2, 2005

I learned about Bloody Mary in a Swedish school. No sleepover or American kids involved. Weird.
posted by dabitch at 12:39 PM on April 2, 2005