Is it safe?

Dear Word Detective: Don’t know if I’m spelling this correctly, but I’d like to know the origin of the “Ollie, Ollie, Oxen Free” shouted by children playing the ancient game of tag. — Carol.

Ah yes, the ancient game of tag. Isn’t there an iPhone app for that now? Apparently there’s now one for solving Sudoku puzzles. You’ll notice that I didn’t say for “playing” Sudoku. No, with this “app,” you just point your phone’s camera at the puzzle and it uses artificial intelligence to solve it for you. Whee! Incidentally, the American Dialect Society (ADS), the linguists and scholars who study and document American English as it is actually spoken, voted at their annual meeting this month to declare “app” (short for “application,” a software program that runs on a computer, telephone, etc.) as the ADS Word of the Year for 2010. Runners-up included “nom” (“Onomatopoetic form connoting eating, especially pleasurably”), “junk” in a number of senses, “Wikileaks,” and “trend” as a verb. “Refudiate” won the “Most Unnecessary” category hands down.

I was never a big fan of playing “Tag” because I was a small, weedy child and consequently spent a disproportionate amount of time being “It.” “Hide and Seek,” where children hide from the child designated “It,” at least gave me the opportunity to get some reading done behind the couch. It’s when “It” finds one of the hiders, of course, that the found child becomes “It” and the game restarts. “Ollie ollie oxen free” is traditionally shouted at this point by the old “It” to let the other players know that they should emerge from their hiding places and start the game over. So the “Ollie” shout is really from Hide and Seek, not Tag.

“Ollie ollie oxen free” is part of what Iona and Peter Opie, in their wonderful book “The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren” (Oxford University Press, 1959), called “the code of oral legislation” among children. The Opies studied and interviewed children in England, Scotland and Ireland just after World War II, meticulously documenting the customs and vocabulary of their rituals, games, and traditions. What they found was a rich culture that in some cases dated back to the Middle Ages and originated in adult customs at that time. For instance, a child in 20th century England would say “barley” to gain temporary respite from a schoolyard fight, a term that comes from the custom of Medieval knights offering their opponent the opportunity to “parley” or “parlez” (French for “talk”), i.e., ask for mercy. Thus childhood, at the time the Opies studied it, had become a linguistic museum of British history. Today, as we say today, probably not so much.

In the case of “Ollie ollie oxen free” and its many variants, we have a mutated form of the original “all clear” signal. This was probably something like “All’s out come in free” or “All ye out come in free,” meaning that anyone still hiding (“out”) can now come back into the group without fear (“free”) of being tagged “It.” Since the game “Hide and Seek” itself is at least four centuries old, there’s been plenty of time for that original phrase to be filtered through small ears clogged with dirt and come out almost unrecognizable.

The “Ollie” of “Ollie ollie oxen free” is almost certainly the “All ye” reshaped to take the form of “Ollie,” short for the proper name “Oliver.” The “oxen” is classic folk etymology, where a word or words that sound unfamiliar to the listener (“come in,” in this case), especially when slurred, are given the form of a more familiar word (“oxen”). Of course, many British customs have jumped the pond to the US and Canada, and “Ollie ollie oxen free” is well known in America, often with regional variations. In areas of the Midwest settled by immigrants from Norway, for instance, one popular form is “Ole Ole Olsen’s free.”

Sadly, I should probably say “was,” because that form was documented by the Dictionary of American Regional English back in the 1960s. You don’t have to be a geezer to see that the loss of the native culture of childhood to cable TV, videogames and their ilk represents the severing of a irreplaceable link between everyday life today and life centuries ago. The anarchic play of unsupervised kids was, in a real sense, steeped in the culture, from chivalry to superstition, of their great-great-great-and-beyond-grandparents. Kids grew up, but the ancient river of childhood flowed on to greet each new generation. But I’m sure that soon we’ll have an app to replace that. Nom nom.

Shaboom shaboom.

Dear Word Detective: Lately, I’ve come across the word “stonking” a lot, as in “That’s a big stonking slice of pie you’ve got there.” As a hint, I’ll tell you I read a lot of car review magazines, and I’ve noticed for many years that the guys who write for these publications crib off of each other quite a bit. This could explain why I’ve noticed the word so much, but it doesn’t do much to explain where it comes from. Any ideas? I assume it’s been influenced by “honking” or “stinking.” — Dalton.

Thanks for a good question. You don’t say where you’re located, but “stonking” in the sense you’ve encountered it has been popular slang in the UK for many years, and enjoyed a certain vogue there in the late 1980s and early 90s. So if you’re just now encountering it, my guess is that you’re in the US. The Brits, of course, are famous for their intriguing but opaque slang. No one, for example, has ever come up with a convincing explanation for either “boffin,” meaning “a technical researcher or expert,” or “bog standard,” the equivalent of our “standard issue.” Sometimes I suspect they’re doing it on purpose. Perfidious Albion, y’know.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines “stonking” as an adjective meaning “Excellent, amazing; considerable, powerful” (“The Kenwood receiver is …  stonking value for anyone wanting to take their first steps into home cinema,” 1993), and as an adverb (modifying an adjective) meaning “extremely, very” (“Snogging tackle for stonking wet smackers, warm and reassuring like a comfy settee,” 1993). (Please don’t ask me what that example means. As I said, they’re probably messing with our minds.) The noun “stonker,” which means something very large or impressive of its kind, first popped up in print in the late 1980s.

The main problem in attempting to trace and explain “stonking” is not a lack of information, but a surfeit of leads. The OED points us from “stonking” to “stonk,” a noun, and things get weird right off the bat. The first sense of “stonk,” dating to 1825, equates “stonk” with “stunk,” an English dialect word for the stake or “pot” children put into a game such as marbles, or the game itself, or a single marble. Okay so far. But the second sense of “stonk” the OED gives is “a concentrated artillery bombardment,” dating in print to 1944. I suppose it’s possible that the kids playing marbles grew up and joined the army, but I suspect that we’re dealing with two separate words here and we should regard the first “stonk” as a red herring for our purposes. Incidentally, a persistent story about that artillery “stonk” traces it to a supposed short form for a certain type of bombardment known as a “Standard Regimental Concentration,” which is very unlikely. The OED suggests that the word is “echoic,” mimicking the sound of a shell exploding, which is, to me, a far more believable explanation.

Compounding this muddle is the fact that “stonker” is also a verb in Australian slang meaning “to outwit, defeat, render helpless, defeat” or simply “to kill or destroy,” and “stonkered” is a popular slang synonym for “drunk” as well. These uses pretty clearly come from the “artillery bombardment” sense of “stonk,” and the fact that the Australian slang use is first attested in 1919, just after World War I, would tend to support that thesis.

So, having laid out all the bits and pieces of evidence, I suppose I’d better take a stab at fashioning a coherent explanation of “stonking.” I think it’s very likely that “stonking,” in its modern senses of “excellent, amazing” and “very, extremely,” comes ultimately from “stonk” meaning “concentrated artillery barrage,” dating back to around World War I and formed “echoically” from the sound of exploding shells. The sense of the overwhelming force of such a attack carried over as the term “stonking” was generalized and tempered over the years, much as “dynamite” and “explosive” have come to be applied to an exciting or disruptive development in celebrity gossip, for instance.