Knuckle Down, Bony Tight

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m Gary Gladstone, and I am from Carmel, New York, in New York’s beautiful Hudson Valley.

Oh, lovely. Carmel.

Welcome to the show, Gary.

Well, thank you.

My dad used to brag about his knuckle-down, screw-bony-tight technique to win when he played marbles back in Denver in 1915, and I never found out what it was.

For years, this saying rolled around my head. I wondered what it meant, but Dad never explained its meaning.

So I had this mental image of playing a winning shot and then having to go to the emergency room with bleeding knuckles or something.

So I’m waiting for a revelation now for almost 75 years.

All I could think of was that the expression sounded all that time a little like something you could be arrested for.

So I really want to know what he was talking about, if you guys have any idea about that.

What was the expression again?

Knuckle down, screw bony tight.

Knuckle down, screw bony tight.

And so he played marbles. I’m assuming he was a child in 1915, right?

And he played marbles.

Yes, yeah, he was about 10 years old.

And somewhere between his generation and yours, the marble game disappeared, right?

You didn’t play it?

I didn’t play it. I never played it. I used to collect marbles because they were beautiful.

I liked the swirling colors. I didn’t want to get down on my hands and knees and do anything with them, to tell you the truth.

Well, fortunately, from his generation going back about 300 years, marbles was a great game for kids, a huge game.

And I make it sound like there’s just one. We’re talking maybe a thousand different versions of marbles.

And with those thousand versions of the game, there were thousands of slang terms and jargon that belonged to each little pocket of each little game and all over the English-speaking world.

So all that is to say, fortunately, variations of this term have been recorded in glossaries in the academic work of people who’ve studied marble language.

Wow.

I’ve never seen it as knuckle-down, screw-bony tight.

What I always see it as is knuckle-down, bony tight.

Knuckle down, bony tight.

And the interpretation of this is, in most common versions of marbles, it’s a little like craps where there’s a lot of shouting, but in marbles you can kind of direct the play from the outside.

So if we’re all gathered around a circle, we’ve got the agates in the middle. These are kind of marbles that you target.

You can shout things to the guy who’s currently shooting his marbles to hit them and make him do stuff.

And if you shout at him, knuckle down, bony tight, you’re telling him, first you have to turn your hand upside down, palm up, knuckles down to the ground.

So you’d shoot from that position, and you have to put your hand close to or on the ground.

So you’re kind of restricting their ability to have a free and easy throw.

And there’s a ton of these kinds of terms.

So knuckle down, bony tight is kind of a really restrictive, very complicated, but very like, you know, I don’t want you to get your knocking marbles out of the middle and outside of the ring, so I’m trying to tell you what to do to do that.

Yeah, you might do that to somebody who’s in the lead, right?

Yeah, exactly.

They’re doing a lot better than everybody else, so they have to have some kind of thing to limit their movement.

There’s all this language that you can throw at the other player to make them do what you want. That’s just one of them.

It’s a whole culture.

I had no idea that marbles were that important then.

Well, if you’re interested in this, look for the publications of the American Dialect Society.

They had one entire issue devoted to the language of marbles, and it’s great stuff.

It’s really interesting going deep diving into that and seeing how complicated the game could be.

One thing I wanted to say before we go, it’s strange to say that you could tell the other person what to do, right?

We think of this as weird, don’t we?

That if you’re shooting, that I can tell you what to do, how to shoot the marble.

But the thing is, it echoes what was happening in baseball.

Baseball, the batter used to call the pitch and say what they wanted from the pitcher.

It’s very similar to that.

I didn’t know that.

So there’s different kinds of directing the play in order to get the marble or the ball where you want it to go.

The fans do that now.

Yeah, don’t they?

They’re never listened to.

Gee, guys, thank you.

Now my blood pressure goes down and I can sleep tonight.

Well, hallelujah.

We’re glad to help.

Thanks for calling, Gary.

Call us some other time, okay?

Really appreciate it.

I’ll call next time.

I’m wondering where the expression losing your marbles comes from.

Thank you, sir.

That’s later.

Take care.

All right.

Bye-bye, Gary.

Super.

Bye-bye.

I’m sorry I got so excited there.

Oh, it’s wonderful stuff, right?

Can I read a list to you of some marble terms?

Just to kind of give people a taste of what’s out there.

Oh, my gosh.

Aggie, backkill and crooks, dead, dog up, drop up, fat, fudge, goes, keeps, kicks, kill, knucks, lag, marbles, poke up, rounds, slips, tall, tracks, vents.

I mean, and that’s like a fraction of like the, I think there are at least 1,500, maybe 2,000 terms here.

Yeah.

For marbles and variations on marbles.

Very rich language.

And didn’t we get playing for keeps from marbles?

I believe it is, yeah, because you do in most versions of the game get to keep the marbles that you knock out of the ring.

Yeah.

Or that you knock into the hole depending on which version you’re playing.

Yeah, so rich.

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