Hull Gull

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Madeline from Madison, Wisconsin.

Hi, Madeline. Welcome to the show.

What can we help you with?

Oh, well, I have a delightful assignment to edit a book of children’s games.

Oh, nice.

These are games maybe from the 1940s or 1950s.

Oh, cool.

And they were collected by rural recreation leaders, the kind of people who were then working with 4-H clubs or church camps.

And one of these games is called Hull Go.

And the way the game goes is that children have fistfuls of some number of beans or corn kernels, and they go around the room until they find another child.

And then they stick out their hand, and one of them goes, Hull Go.

And then the other child says, Hands Full.

And then the first one says, How many?

And then the one child, the other child, has to guess the number of beans.

Anyway, I was just wondering, where does whole goal come from?

So if they guess right, they get to keep all of the beans or corn kernels or marbles or whatever they’re using, right?

Right. And then you run up to another child.

And so all the children are running around.

And whoever the person wins, who ends up with the most number of beans or all the beans, you know, after a period of time.

This is like capitalism in minimum form.

Start him early.

Something like that.

Oh, Holgol’s got an interesting history.

You know, years ago for my old dictionary website, which you can now find merged with the A Way with Words website, I wrote an entry for Holgol, I mean, sorry, Holy Gully, which is a phrase that we use to mean disorganized or haphazard.

And it could be like, yeah, she didn’t even fold the clothes.

She just shoved them in the dresser all Holy Gully, you know.

And it turns out my theory at the time was that Holy Golly is related to this game Hull Goal.

I’m not exactly sure why, but there was some evidence in the citation records that kind of showed that the people had borrowed the Holy Golly from the game.

But the clue here that gets to the answer of your question, where Hull Goal, that’s H-U-L-L-G-U-L-L, comes from usually two words or two words hyphenated.

You can find a clue to the answer in the Dictionary of American Regional English, one of our favorite books in the world.

And in there, they quote the English dialect dictionary and speculating that hull is an English dialect word meaning to cover or to hide.

And gull refers to a different kids game called gullstones, where they used rough stones in place of marbles, maybe the kinds of stones that a bird might collect when building a nest.

Do gulls do that?

There’s a certain kind of birds.

Do ox do that?

Some kinds of birds do that.

Yeah.

I don’t know that there’s a connection there.

But anyway, so the English dialect dictionary supposes that it comes from goal stones, and the Dictionary of American Regional English buys into that assumption.

So we’re pretty sure, let’s say 95% confident, that whole comes from an old English dialect word meaning to hide or to cover up.

And the goal part probably is thrown in there just because it rhymes, but it might also be related to goal stones used in other kids’ games in the UK.

I like that.

Cool, right?

Very cool. Yeah, these are fun games.

I have to tell you, though, I’m really interested in the book that you’re editing.

I am too, yeah.

Because Martha and I have talked numerous times on the show about Iona and Peter Opie, who did a lot of children’s research, and this is the kind of stuff that they loved.

And they’ve written some really wonderful books about kids’ games.

And it sounds like if you’ve got old records from the 1940s and 50s, and these are being turned into a book, that’s pretty cool, because when they get it pre-internet kind of, I don’t know, it’s a little bit before people were just borrowing all their games and catchphrases from television, right?

Oh, yeah.

It’s golden.

But, yeah, these are games.

I sometimes try to Google them to find out background, and they aren’t there.

So, yeah, definitely pre-internet.

But also definitely passed on and used around the country.

Yeah, I thought you were going to say you tried the games.

Oh, I’ve definitely tried the games.

We’ve got 200 in them, and I’ve done 100 of them myself.

That is really cool.

Thank you so much, Madeline.

Thanks, Madeline.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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