Talk:Hide and seek
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I grew up in an ultra-conservative farming community, with long lasting traditional values and even in the 1970s, a "quaint" form of English.
The call made by children I grew up with, definitely sounded like "All ye, all ye, oxen free!". If hide and go seek is a form of a shepherd's game (incidently, shep-herd being sheep herd, or a sheep herder), it is not hard to envision a game ending where a oxen gets "free" (home being free.. and since a oxen "won" and managed to achieve freedom, the game is over). As for ox singular, and oxen plural, I do not find it hard to conceive of oxen being taken as singular and plural much as sheep or moose is, expecially with some of the coloquial variants of English that could be found before television/radio.
Anyhow, my point is that "oxen free" survived, for all children know what an oxen is (in farming communities), but not what "All ye" is... as this form of English has expired. Since children taught children this game, not adults, I can see the phrase slowly becoming warped.. after all, there is a complete turn over of children every 5-10 years in this game. Ollie = All ye.
I could swear 'ollie ollie income-free' was a pun, making fun of bankruptcy/unemployment.
[edit] Dangers
A reader would not seriously expect to read about fatal incidents while playing Hide and Seek as it is not an extreme sport, anybody can be killed doing anything, hide and seek is about one of the safe activities around. Maybe a news link about an unusual incident could go under a Trivia subheading, but even that would be pushing the boundaries of useless crap/bullshit. Grumpyyoungman01 05:59, 4 March 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Merging?
Cocky Olly, barring the name and cry, sounds extremely akin to the form of hide-and-seek I played when I was very young. Forty-forty also sounds like a hide-and-go-seek game. It seems to me that they should be merged with this hide-and-seek article, but that's up to you. I also remember that growing up, we distinguished between hide-and-go-seek and hide-and-go-seek tag. That was literally what we called them. This was about a decade ago. (Now no kids I meet even realise there was such a thing as a no-tag hide-and-seek). Should there be a mention of this distinction? Hey, is "A, B, C, base on me!" mentioned anywhere?
