Pig Latin, and Other Oldies

With all of the changes taking place in the lives of young children, I was remembering how we had fun speaking Pig Latin when I was a child.  We had no electronic toys to capture our attention and our play was mostly invented on the spot.

For any who are not familiar with Pig Latin, here is what my online source had to say about it:

(n.) Form of language, used esp. by children, that is derived from ordinary English by moving the first consonant or consonant cluster of each word to the end of the word and adding the sound (ā), as in Eakspay igpay atinlay for “Speak Pig Latin”

Dictionary.com .

 

Somewhere in our playful speaking I remember a silly ditty where a different persons name could be inserted, such as "Sam de ham, alla ka fam, te legged, ti legged bow legged Sam".  No one was ever offended by this, you just got it right back in good measure.

 

We had board games such as "India".  The foreign looking figures decorating the board showed bejeweled, colorful figures which conjured up all sorts of thoughts of the mysterious country of India.  Today the same game can be found at stores like Target, Walmart, etc by the name of  "Parchise"

 

Before we had graduated to "India" we imitated the behavior of our mother by cooking up a meal using the leaves of a weed called "plantain".  This weed is still around and may be called by a different name.  the leaves are long, broad and deep veined with long stems coming from the middle with seed pods at the end, which reminded us of rat tails.  Using two rocks, one as a table and one as a pounder we beat on the leaf and pretended each was a pork chop.  Probably my mother had done this to flatten a pork chop to make it easier to fry.

 

When clover was in bloom we made "daisy" chains by splitting near the end of the stem on a clover bloom and inserting another clover stem in it, and pulling it through we soon had a long necklace to adorn ourselves.

 

When it was June Bug time, catching a green June Bug became a fun thing to do.  If you were agile enough to tie a string to the leg of this flying insect you had entertainment enough to keep you out of trouble for a while observing him fly. 

 

Group games like Tag, Blind Man's Bluff and Red Rover were also used to keep us engaged and safe in our own back yards.

 

On a very hot day if your mother had a huge wash tub and she wanted to help us cool off, she filled it with water and we happily splashed away under her watchful eye at her kitchen window.  When I was a little older and had learned to swim our town built a swimming pool and we were old enough  to travel there on our own and for a small fee we could swim and dive and have a  wonderful time.  I kept a skinned big toe on my right foot all summer long for several summers trying to learn to dive.

 

Once each summer our parents took a two week vacation at a park on Lake Herrington, Ky., where they rented a cabin big enough to accommodate our large family.  My father loved to fish and this was one way he could get away from work and take the entire family.  The pool for swimming was a floating, wooden structure built out into the lake.  It was fenced in under the walk around it and it had a slide at the deep end.  My father would stand at the bottom of the slide and encourage us to slide down to his waiting arms, thus I learned to swim.  I also got the worse sunburn of my life doing this.  I don't think we had ever heard of sun cream to protect us from burn.  As a little girl my shoulders were so badly blistered that I could not wear anything on the top.  My dad wanted a Sunday paper and I was sent to buy it at the little dock side store.  I was embarrassed to go but was told it was okay as I was just a little girl.

 

Our Sunday activities were pretty much the same each week.  The entire family attended Sunday School and Worship service.  Our mother put our Sunday dinner on the stove to cook while we were gone.  When we reached home she had our big meal on the table in no time.  Almost every Sunday we had someone join us for dinner (lunch).  In the afternoon it was funny paper time.  Then come Sunday evening back we went to Sunday evening services at church.  It is no wonder I remember all the old hymns - if not all the lyrics.

 

For some time there has been a public argument going on about children spending too much time in front of the television.  This discussion has evolved into more electronic toys as they had been invented and reinvented and expanded on .  Studies bring out the danger of too much repetitive use of the hands in using these modern day toys.

 

Children can benefit from many different kinds of childhood play.  The games are as unlimited as the imagination of the children (hopefully guided by older, wiser supervision).  One of my mother's favorite sayings was "necessity is the mother of invention".  In my experience as a teacher of young children I have learned that in the classroom , if you do not give children something to do, within two minutes, they will invent something to do.  So, it behooved us to have something ready before those young feet made their way into the classroom.