In Minnesota, It’s Duck, Duck, Gray Duck

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there, this is Pam.

Hi, Pam. Where are you?

I am in Beaufort, South Carolina.

Beautiful Beaufort. Well, welcome to the show.

Well, it seems that my husband, who is from Minnesota, played a different playground game than the rest of the planet, or at least it seems that way to me.

But the game known to us here in South Carolina as Duck, Duck, Goose, in Minnesota it’s referred to as Duck, Duck, Gray Duck.

-huh.

And describe this game for it.

Well, it’s the old game where everyone is squatting in a little circle and one person is it.

And it goes around touching heads.

And if you’re in South Carolina, you hit each little head and say, duck, duck.

And then you pick the person you’re going to tag.

You would say goose.

And then you run around the circle, and they run behind you, and you try to get to their empty spot before they do.

And then they would pick the next it.

But in Minnesota, when you’re tagging someone, you tag them as a gray duck.

So I was just curious about the origins of that variation.

And one other question for you, Pam.

Does he have a particular sense of, oh, I don’t know, superiority about his version of the game?

Of course he does.

We all do when it comes to our childhood memories.

That’s right.

Well, Pam, the reason I asked about whether he has a sense of superiority about this game is that it is this version Duck, Duck, Gray Duck is associated almost exclusively with Minnesota.

Some Minnesotans will tell you that their version is adapted from a similar Swedish game.

They have a lot of pride in what’s supposedly a Swedish tradition, but I’ve never talked to a Swede who is familiar with that particular game, Duck, Duck, Gray Duck.

I have Swedish acquaintances and no Swedes, and if it exists, they don’t know it.

One other clue about the Minnesota version of the game is that there is a version of it that is recorded in a book from the 1940s.

It was by a pair of Minnesota educators.

Yeah, that’s right. It’s Education in the Kindergarten.

The second edition was from 1948, the first edition of 1936, by Josephine Foster and Neith Headley, both of the University of Minnesota, and they’re both involved in pedagogy.

And I don’t know if the first edition has it but the second edition definitely has this whole explanation of duck duck gray duck with the version where if the child who is chased is caught before he can get back to his place in the circle he has to go in the middle of the circle squatting like a duck until the game is finished.

So that that could be why a whole generation of Minnesotans started playing it that way.

Yeah, can you imagine?

From 48 onward or even 36 onward, that is many decades of people learning this one version of the game.

If this book became the game textbook for school teachers across the state of Minnesota when they were figuring out games to play with their kids, I could see that being a good reason.

That’s interesting, isn’t it?

So Pam, what version does get played in your house?

We just, I think we pretty much agreed just to leave that one on the shelf and, you know, play Parcheesi or something like that instead.

Because, you know, then we don’t have to argue about it.

Musical chairs, something like that.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, Pam, we don’t know why.

So there you go.

We don’t know either.

Your husband doesn’t know and we don’t know.

But our theory is that this book, Education in the Kindergarten by Josephine Foster and Neith Headley of the University of Minnesota, may have made this game, this particular version of the game, well-known and widespread in Minnesota.

Well, I’m going to have to get a copy of that book and see what else I can analyze from there as well.

Well, let us know what you find out, okay?

Okay. Thank you so much for your work on this.

Take care now.

Sure thing.

Take care.

You too.

Bye-bye.

Well, maybe you’ve played Duck, Duck, Gray Duck or a different version altogether.

We’d love to hear about it.

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