Children’s Truce Terms: Fainites and Barleys

Happily, the Deaf Old Buggers are still three in number. Recently, one of them was recalling his days at the orphanage in England in the nineteen-forties. This was not an institution for the faint-hearted, and fights among the boys were not uncommon. There was, however, a certain code of honour. You could not hit your opponent when he was down; you had to wait for him to get up again. And it was possible to call a truce at any time: “Fainites,” you would cry.

This reminded me of my days as a child in Australia where we too would fight from time to time, and  would have a call for truce, although perhaps it was more a call of surrender. When your opponent had you on the ground in a neck-hold, if you managed to gasp out “Barleys”, he would have to release you.

I remember on one occasion, one of us cried “Barleys”, and the victor retorted: “You can’t say ‘barleys’ when the Japs are after you.” This was a legitimate remark in Australia just after the Second World War.

“Barleys” and “fainites”, and their variations, are but two of many truce words used in children’s games, according to the authority on this topic, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren by Iona and Peter Opie. In some cases they date back to the  Middle Ages.

In answering a question about the origin of “fainites” in the Guardian column “Notes and Queries”, Meff Lewis writes:

The word itself derives from the 14th- century "feine" or "faine", itself deriving from the Old French se feindre meaning "to make excuses, hang back, back out (esp. of battle)". The "nites" part may have originated in "faine Sir Knight", a medieval truce in non-mortal combat or jousting. JRR Tolkien points out the Chaucerian usage where, in the Clerk's Tale, a servant says "that lordes heestes mowe nat been yfeyned", meaning that his orders could not be treated with a "fain I" (I decline) but must be obeyed.

As with “fainites”, “barleys” dates back to the Middle Ages as well, appearing as a truce term (barlay) in the 14th century poem, “St. Gawain and the Green Knight”. The possible origins of the word are fascinating. To cry barleyfummilin in old Scots is to ask for a truce. In an old English and Scottish chasing game Barley Break, the action seems to have begun with the cry, “Barley Break” to end the barley or parley, that is, the preliminary talking, and to start chasing. Could a participant then cease the action, by crying, “Barley”? This seems to me the most likely origin of the term, from the English word parley, from the French parler.

In a discussion of the word “barleys” in the online Australian MacQuarie Dictionary, contributors reveal that this was the truce word used universally across Australia, not so much in a fight as I remember it, but as a call for a pause in any game such as chasey (tag) if you had to dash off to the dunny (loo). Perhaps our simple Australian  game of chasey could be traced back to the more elaborate Barley Break. Sometimes “barleys”, or “barlees”, or   “barleese”, for as part of the oral tradition it was never written down, was stressed on the first syllable, sometimes the second, and in Australian fashion, sometimes it was shortened to “bars”.

We may be near the end of an oral tradition extending back hundreds of years. As with skipping rhymes, we never picked up these terms from our parents, but from other kids. They were passed on, as children’s subculture, not from generation to generation, but within generations, from older to younger kids. A little girl ventures out onto the playground and is invited into the game, perhaps to make up numbers. She absorbs “the lore and language of childhood”. Sadly, this tradition may be dying as children play more “sophisticated” electronic games and text instead of talk.

These are only two of many terms discussed in the interesting article in Wikipedia, “Truce Terms” from which I have gleaned much of this information. The third of the DOBs, who was a young kid in the late nineteen thirties in Ontario, had no recollection of any such words. They may not have caught on in Canada. Perhaps readers will share some memories from their childhood. For another of the DOBs’ excursions into language, see Deaf Old Buggers in a Subjunctive Mood.

Woke: an Old Word with a New Meaning

I’m only an ordinary bloke

And used to think the word “woke”

Was just the past tense of a verb, nothing more.

But now it’s a new adjective

Applied to folk sensitive

Who social and racial injustice abhor.

At times a militant Woke

Will cancel an ordinary bloke

Who offers a different opinion than he.

Offence may be quite unintended

But the very least said, soonest mended,

Oppositional viewpoints not accepted, you see.

(Ordinary bloke protests)

“It was only my personal view,

And nothing to do with you, 

It was certainly not my intention to slight.”

(Militant Woke responds)

“Despite your earnest confession,

Twas an act of microaggression,

To not be offended, that is my right!”

Down with Singular “They”

I hope that I’m not cancelled by the Woke community for expressing this opinion. It’s not just J. K. Rowling or Margaret Atwood or Steven Lewis who face the threat of cancellation for expressing an opinion that inadvertently offends someone; humble folk like me can be cancelled as well. A friend’s daughter feels threatened, not even because she disagreed with an opinion on Facebook, but because she failed to support it. If I lose even half my readers for committing a small act of microaggression, I will have only three left.

But I must speak out against the general use of the singular “they”. Recently I was reading a story about a mail deliverer who encountered a savage dog. I read that they managed to escape the dog, and I thought, whoops, I didn’t realize there were two of them. I must have missed the appearance of a second person. But no, it was a singular “they”.  There was only one person. For some reason the writer was reluctant, or even afraid, to identify the mail deliverer as male or female in the beginning and then use the masculine or feminine singular pronoun thereafter.

There has to be a balance, doesn’t there, between discretion and clarity? Perhaps the writer thought that the sex of the mail deliverer was irrelevant, or perhaps the mail deliverer had not wished to be identified as either male or female, but the reader needs to know whether there was one person, or more. Unfortunately, we don’t have a singular pronoun in English that will stand for a person of either or neither sex, but please, let’s not use the pronoun “they”, which for many of us still denotes (and connotes) plurality. In the story that I read, if the writer had not wished to specify the sex of the mail deliverer, the writer could have avoided the pronoun altogether by repeating the noun, as I just did. A bit awkward, but better than confusion or misinformation. But 98% of the time, the subject of the story will be happy to be identified as he or she, so why not relate that information to the reader?

Some people may wish to be referred to as “they” in the singular, and that is fine with me, but in other circumstances, where it’s possible and appropriate to use “he” or “she”, let’s do it. I know that Shakespeare is supposed to have used a singular “they”, but I’m sure that Hamlet would have said:

To yield or not to yield, that is the question.

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

These foul abuses of our native tongue,

Remaining mute, forsooth, in fear of being 

Cancelléd, in consequence of having caused

Offence, however inadvertently,

To Someone with a Different Point of View. —

Or to take arms against Grammatical

Absurdity, like Plural Pronouns forced

To play a different role against

Their very nature: a Singular

Obscenity, Unnatural and Foul.

Language Evolves

My eleven-year-old granddaughter made my day. “Did you have a fun time at the cabin?” someone asked. “I had lots of fun,” she replied. 

We had spent a delightful day at the family’s cabin at Nora Lake. An idyllic spot overlooking the water, inaccessible by road until a few years ago, off the grid, no wifi, no cell phone reception unless you climbed a hill searching for a click. You enjoyed yourself in old-fashioned ways: hiking, swimming, sitting, reading, thinking, and eating and drinking. There were mosquitos, of course, and fierce, biting flies, but after all, this was Manitoba. No poison ivy though, and as yet, I haven’t pulled off any ticks.  The silence was palpable, broken only by the rumble of CP trains crossing the viaduct between the lakes.

This was cabin-living as it used to be, as far removed from modern cottage accommodation as you can imagine. Everyone slept higgledy-piggledy in a a wooden shack built almost a century ago and little changed since then. The lights and stove were fuelled by propane, water was drawn from the lake, and the calendar on the wall gave you the date in 1963. A few steps up he hill was a charming, sweet-smelling biffy, a place for silent contemplation, a room with a view.

But I digress. Did you have a fun time at the cabin?” someone had asked. “I had lots of fun,” my granddaughter replied. “‘Fun time’ doesn’t sound right,” she said. “No,” said my daughter, “that’s because ‘fun’ is a noun, not an adjective, although some people use it as one.” (My daughter is a grammarian, but also a psychiatrist, so she is in no way judgemental, like me.)

I was interested. “Your brother,” I asked, “The other night, he sneaked, or snuck, out of the house?”. “Snuck,” she said. Ah. “And he dived, or dove, off the rocks?” “He dove off the rocks,” she said. Well, at least he didn’t dive off of the rocks, I thought.

I am happy to know that “fun” hasn’t gone totally gone over to the other side, and along with a few of my peers I will continue to use “sneaked” and “dived” as the past tense and past participles of those verbs, but perhaps when I do, people of my granddaughter’s generation will say to themselves, “Silly old fart. Didn’t he learn any grammar at school?” Language evolves.