![]() So this is the vernacular of children some time back.īags was normal. No idea why or how this came ot pass, but there you have it. Ifyou rossed your fingers and shouted "squits" or "Squitsies" then no one could get you with the lurgy or make you It. At my junior school in the south of Essex, we had a very specific term along the vein of 'vainites' which was 'squitsies'. ![]() (Lies- I still say both now) I've never used 'dibs' but it's familiar enough, probably from broadsheet commentary thinking about it. It was always 'bagsy' and 'bagsy not it' when I was groeing up. (I'm old enough to remember the days when rear seats didn't have belts and the littlest ones got crammed in the rear footwell.) It was no use when we were kids though, because whoever was driving got to pick who went in the coveted front seat. You have to say it while you're in sight of the car. It's been around for as long as I can remember (I'm 23) with no sense of it being an AmE borrowing. We have shotgun to mean calling the passenger seat in the UK. In the last hour, 50 people have used the word shotgun, often prefaced by I wish I had a. *sob* You in the States can let me know whether this is the case.īy the way, I've left the Twitter window with the 'shotgun' search going. So maybe the kids in America have lost or are losing the true meaning of shotgun. While I think that's a good thing safety-wise, I'm getting rather nostalgic thinking about, for example, climbing in and out of the back seat of a moving car or cramming myself down in the foot-well when I felt like it. No more cramming ten kids into the back of a (AmE) station wagon/(BrE) estate car everyone's in car seats now, and the law determines which of those are allowed in the front seat. But I have to wonder whether shotgun will go the way of the library card catalog(ue), since riding in a car is a completely different experience for children today than it was for children in my day. So, gangs of teenagers also need ways to establish pecking orders. Americans can also get a (AmE) driver's license/(BrE) driving licence by age 16 in most states (as compared to 18 17 at the earliest in the UK). What's happened? The BrE speakers have heard Americans say shotgun in a place in a situation in which they would have said bags(y), and didn't realis, you'd expect any family to have a car-and more than one child to fight over the best seat in that car. In fact, if I had read this tweet without already having had the discussion with BrE speakers about dibs and bagsy, I doubt I would have been able to make sense of it. Timeshighered We hereby shotgun the rights to the phrase "I survived Twitocalypse 2010" - this time next year, we'll be millionaires! Here's an example from a Twitter feed I follow: And they have adopted the word, to some extent. But just as happens when words are borrowed from another language, the non-native users of the word have changed the meaning when they've adopted the word. Bagsey me breast.Ī verbal form of dibs is also widely reported ( I dibsed it!), but I'd be much more likely to say I've got dibs on it or I called dibs on that.īut when I posted dibs/bagsy as the 'Difference of the Day' on Twitter, some BrE speakers questioned my translation, as they had understood (AmE) shotgun to mean the same as bags(y). ![]() 28 ( caption) Mark Sutherland baggsys a window seat. ![]() in People in Playground (1993) 129 I'm second, I just baggsied it! 1995 New Musical Express 28 Oct. (To get a feel for possible dialectal boundaries of this, see this thread at Wordwizard.) To put this in the verbal form, you can bags or bagsy something, but, as you can see from the OED examples, the spelling is hard to pin down: In BrE, at least down here in the South, bagsy would do, though it might just be bags. Which is all to say, in the American idiom: Your mileage may vary when it comes to the playground terminology I'm discussing today.īut with that feat of (AmE) ass-covering out of the way, here's how you might have answered the question. Words are invented, misheard, re-invented, borrowed and those changes don't travel far, but may be passed down to the children who are just a little younger, who later pass it down to the ones who are just a little younger, and so on. The thing about childhood rituals is that they are passed among children, who tend to operate very locally-with their siblings, their schoolmates, their neighbo(u)rs. What is that word?Ĭhances are that there are dozens and dozens of ways to answer that question. Running toward(s) it, you shout the recogni(s/z)ed word for signal (l)ing a claim on desired objects. Simultaneously you both spot a single gorilla mask abandoned on a park bench. So, you're 10 years old, playing with your best friend.
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