Horsengoggle

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Donald R. Clymer from Harrisonburg, Virginia, tells us that he was with a group of fellow language professors when one of them used the term horsingoggle. He’d never heard of this expression before, but he was told that horsingoggle is a way of selecting a recipient of something. And he was wondering what that’s all about.

And Grant, have you ever played horse and goggle?

No, but it’s a counting out rhyme, basically, to decide who gets chosen.

Exactly. Say you have a bunch of kids at the table and there’s leftover dessert or maybe a slice of pizza, then you horse and goggle it. Basically, you all form a circle and the leader of the group says one, two, three, horse and goggle. And on the word horse and goggle, everybody holds up a certain number of fingers, like whatever you choose, and you have to keep holding them up, and then you count the number of fingers being held up. Then from a previously designated person in the circle, you start counting off, going around, and the person in the spot that corresponds to the total number of fingers is the winner.

And the word horse and goggle, we don’t know the origin of that, but there might be some German influence there because a lot of people around the country play einzweidrei horse and goggle.

Yeah.

And there are a wide number of counting rhymes in German, just as there are in English.

Mm—

So maybe a misinterpretation of a German word or just a fake German word to sound funny?

That’s what I would guess.

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