How to play mumble-the-peg, mumchance, and hurling to the country | Hacker News Reader

How to play mumble-the-peg, mumchance, and hurling to the country

laphamsquarterly.org

42 pointsAmorymeltzer21 comments

We played "split the kipper" in Scotland over 50 years ago with pocket knives which is Mumbledypeg by another name.

Iona and Peter Opie's Oxford dictionary of children's games, written in the 60s, is fascinating.

https://www.opiearchive.org/

We played "chicken" which generally involved anything sharp and widening your stance each time. Knives or darts in general or on one memorable occasion - an air rifle.

"Chicken" was also the name given to a bloody stupid game reminiscent of frogger, except you only have one life. I gave that one a miss, which is probably why I am typing this!

Mumblypeg seems to be more of a game of skill where the penalty isn't a dart in your shin (soz, brother) but the chance to pull out your teeth to general hilarity. Dental hygiene was pretty basic back then as was diet, so losing an incisor must have been a real possibility. I think that is why the name focuses on the peg and "mumbling" rather than the throwing bit. Given this is a very long time ago "mumbly" probably doesn't mean quite what we use it for today. I have a suspicion it might mean "gagging" or "choking" or it might simply indicate that the mumbly orifice (mouth) is involved. As with all these sorts of games - all possibilities were correct somewhere. No doubt some inventive placements of the peg were found - eg in a cow pat or a nettle patch.

"Base" must surely be the origin of the bases in baseball. Basically baseball is bases with a twist (or two).

“We will make a pit-hole and there cast our nuts.” - that's marbles nowadays. I clearly remember doing that at Button Lane Infant School, Manc. Lancs. in 1976 and at Paderborn First School (BFES). I can recall buying marbles in the Sudring supermarket in Paderborn and I can attest that German kids were well catered for marbles back then (far better than we had in the UK). There was and probably still is a complicated exchange rate for the various marble types. One of our neighbours in Paderborn was a tankie (QRIH) and his lads obtained a few bearings from a Chieftain tank - 50mm or so across. They had a massive exchange value! They could shatter a glass marble if deployed correctly ...

Mumbletypeg was still played in Illinois when I was a kid, although the rules changed to trying to get your knife into the ground as close to your foot as possible.

Yes. that's the same variation we played. That's why the teachers banned it, and we moved to playing it in the green spaces away from supervision after school.

It says a lot about the Scots diet it's named after smoked fish there.

You threw the knife as close to the outer edge of your foot as possible, and then moved your stance wider, so that the knife was then on the inside of the foot. In this way, your stance got wider and wider, until on player couldn't move their feet wide enough to continue. Also, your opponent had to reach the knife and pull it from the ground in order to start their turn. Falling over also constituted losing the game. Are we talking about the same game?

We called it whitley-peg, and we played it with shovels in the boy scouts in the mid-to-late 1990s to avoid being caught doing such nonsense with a knife (and getting our totin' chip torn up by a responsible adult).

Yes. we're talking about the same game. There's probably a hundred variations but to me, substantively these are the same game.

There is a cartoon by Johnny Hart of one of the "B.C." characters playing a variant where the knife balances on the back of the hand, and is flipped and he winds up "stabbing" his shadow which peter-pan like, complains.

Losin you totin' chip was the worst.

I played it as a kid in Nebraska as well, except you had to throw it at your opponent's foot, rather than your own. For that reason, we would play it with screwdrivers rather than knives.

I grew up in Texas and I grew up playing "mumble the peg." We called it "Mumbly-peg" though, so its weird hearing the game be called something else.

Grew up in Western New York and called it the same thing ("Mumbly-peg"). Though our version was where you simply drop the knife between your feet and then move one foot inward until touches the knife, then repeat until you chicken out. Looks like Wikipedia contains a similar variation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumblety-peg.

In Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men, one of the characters mentions playing "mumbley-peg" as a child in pre-WW2 southern USA. According to wikipedia [1] this is an alternative spelling of the Tudor english "mumble-the-peg" game mentioned in the article.

Facinating how thing persist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumblety-peg

I played "mumbletypeg" as a child, but until this very moment it never occurred to me that was a corruption of "mumble-the-peg".

Fun to see "Bloody Knuckles" referenced on that wikipedia page, too. Ahh, the good old days.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand-in-cap

> Hand-in-cap is an old English trading game and the term itself is the origin of the modern word handicap. In this game, two players want to trade possessions. An umpire decides whether the items have the same value, and if not, what the difference is. Both players and the umpire then put some forfeit money in a cap. The players put their hands in the cap, and then remove them either open, to signal agreement with the valuation, or closed, to signal disagreement. If both players agree, the difference in valuation is paid, the items are traded, and the umpire collects the forfeit. If both players disagree, the items are not traded, and the umpire collects the forfeit. If one player agrees and the other does not, the items are not traded, and the player who agreed to the valuation collects the forfeit.

Instruction on how to play mumchance doesn't appear anywhere in the text I could find. wikipedia has very little info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumchance

Medieval Tennis is hundred times more interesting. Lindybeige demonstrated it thoroughly.

Videolink:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmNxwYtzoy0

If by "interesting" you mean so complicated that I didn't get it.