Egg-Tapping

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, my name is Marion Weaver.

I’m calling from Screw Lake, New York, which is in the east-central Adirondack Mountains of New York State.

Welcome to the show. What is on your mind?

Our family has a little game, I guess you’d call it, an egg-tapping game that we play mostly at Easter time, where after any Easter hunt one might do with children, we gather together for breakfast.

And the first item on the menu, of course, is an Easter egg.

And we each take one of our eggs and examine it carefully for the fact that there are no cracks or anything in it.

And then we do what is schützig.

We find a partner and each of us holds our egg, either the pointed end forward or the rounded end forward.

And one person will fairly forcefully tap the other person’s egg to see if it will crack.

Then you turn them around, and the other person does the same thing to the other end of your egg.

Ideally, your egg has come through that without cracking at all, in which case you have a bit of a kinger.

And then that person goes on to any others who might have survived in the round until everyone has their breakfast egg.

And we proceed to shallot and eat Easter breakfast.

But I was wondering, where is the origin of Stutz coming in?

And I think it’s German.

My father’s family was all German.

It’s something he did as a child.

And I don’t know the spelling of the word.

I never had a course in German.

But I’m guessing it might be spelled either Stutz, S-T-U-T-Z, or something like Stutz, either S-C-H-T-U-T-Z or S-H-U-T-Z.

I really don’t know.

Do you know anything about this?

A little bit, yeah.

So let’s just recap.

So you say let’s Stutz.

That means you’re going to play the game where you egg tap?

Correct.

Okay, and then the one that wins the egg is the kinger, the one that’s the strong one and breaks the other one.

That’s the kinger?

It can be either a whole kinger or a half kinger.

What’s the difference?

Half of the one egg broken, one end or the other, but one end of the egg is whole still.

Okay, gotcha.

And so egg tapping isn’t something that’s done that much in the United States anymore.

Does the younger generation of your family still do it?

Yes, we’ve carried the tradition on.

I’m sort of the matriarch now, but I know my children do it.

And some of us, even if we have to hard-boil eggs, we’ll grab a couple of eggs and play the game just by ourselves.

Yeah.

Just for the fun of it.

It is still known in Europe and definitely was and is practiced in Germany and Austria.

Eierpecken is one of the words for it, meaning egg pecking.

Lots of names for it, egg tapping, egg packing, with an A.

And for a lot of people, they’re thinking, oh, this reminds me of the game Conquers, which is a very similar game you play with chestnuts, also sometimes called Bully in Scotland, where you knock two chestnuts together, sometimes on a string, to see which one breaks first.

And the reason I brought up the chestnuts game is that there may be a connection here to the language that you’re using in your game.

Because in one book of children’s folklore published in 1969 by Iona and Peter Opie, who were great folklorists of children’s folklore, they report that in Plymouth and Cornwall in the UK, a one-kinker was a chestnut that had beaten one other opponent in Conkers.

How about that?

So it’s a very similar language, a one-kinker.

Now, as far as Stutz, I have about 15 German dictionaries here.

I don’t know of a word Stutz.

I looked under a variety of different spellings.

But what I do know is that there is a verb Schützen, S-C-H-U-T-Z-E-N, with the umlaut on the U.

And it means to protect and defend.

And if I understand this correctly, the imperative form where you deliver it as a command is Schütze.

So perhaps what was originally was said generations ago was a command to defend or protect as kind of like the order to begin the game, schütze.

And it sounds, I could see how that could be corrupted to schtutz, but I might be wrong.

And it’s possible also that schtutz is an older dialect word that’s simply, I don’t know because it’s, I’m not a native German speaker and I don’t have that, you know, first person knowledge of it.

And, or maybe it’s a dialect German word that just hasn’t crossed my path before.

But in any case, egg pecking of this kind used to be a lot more common in this country.

And there’s a secret to winning, Marion, that I want to equip you with.

Do you want to hear it?

Oh, my.

The secret is, and this comes from a book by Mac Barick, that’s B-A-R-R-I-C-K, called German-American Folklore.

And Mac says the secret traditionally is to get a guinea egg, a guinea hen egg, because they are virtually unbreakable.

They have a much thicker shell, and they’re almost exactly the same size as a chicken egg.

You sneak your guinea egg in and keep track of it.

You have a ringer in there.

Of course, there’s also the other strategy, which is to lose on a purpose.

What you do is you use a raw, unboiled egg, and you make sure that you tap it from above so that you get raw egg on the other player’s hand.

Well, we would be able to tell if it were a raw egg or not, because all you have to do is get it to spin.

And a raw egg won’t spin.

A hard-boiled one will, so you can protect yourself against that.

Well, I have something to report to my children now.

You do, and I know you’ve pressed the memory button for a lot of listeners, particularly our European listeners, who will probably report back with all their memories and the language that they use of playing egg-tapping or packing or pecking or whatever they like to call it.

And by all means, everyone, do let us know your variation or the rules or the customs and the language evolved, because we’re newbies on this and we don’t know very much except what we can read in our reference books.

So, Marian, thank you so much for sharing your memories and bringing these two new words, Stutz and Kinger, to us.

Oh, thank you. It was my pleasure, believe me. Bye-bye.

Call us, 877-929-9673.