[HN Gopher] How to play mumble-the-peg, mumchance, and hurling t...
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       How to play mumble-the-peg, mumchance, and hurling to the country
        
       Author : Amorymeltzer
       Score  : 38 points
       Date   : 2023-04-12 13:31 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.laphamsquarterly.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.laphamsquarterly.org)
        
       | jowdones wrote:
       | "Forbidden
       | 
       | You don't have permission to access /roundtable/rules-games-
       | tudor-england on this server."
       | 
       | Am I the only one getting this? Would be discriminatory.
        
         | neonate wrote:
         | http://web.archive.org/web/20230414013647/https://www.lapham...
         | 
         | https://archive.ph/MucWL
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | ggm wrote:
       | 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/
        
         | failrate wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | aquova wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | ggm wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | KMag wrote:
             | 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).
        
               | ggm wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | ticviking wrote:
               | Losin you totin' chip was the worst.
        
       | andyjohnson0 wrote:
       | 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
        
         | JohnFen wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | danjoredd wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | marmalar wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | autoexec wrote:
       | 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
        
       | SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
       | Is hurling a uniquely Irish thing? I had an Irishman describe it
       | to me recently. I consider myself a decently well traveled gent
       | and I had never heard of it before.
        
         | mr_magoo wrote:
         | Yes, its unique to Ireland (exceptions that prove the rule are
         | some Irish expat communities have established teams in their
         | new home countries)
        
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       (page generated 2023-04-14 23:01 UTC)