Ollie Ollie Oxen Free

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, my name is Celia from Arlington, Texas.

Hi, Celia. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Celia. What’s up?

Well, I’m home with bronchitis.

Oh.

You use this as an opportunity to get to listen to your show.

Okay, I’m sorry. I’ve been there with bronchitis. It’s no fun.

Well, I have a question about a childhood game called Hide and Seek.

I grew up in northeast Iowa, and when we gave up and wanted people to come out of their hiding places, we said a phrase that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

We said, ollie ollie oxen free.

Ollie ollie oxen free.

Yeah, and I assume that was just a phrase that was part of the game, kind of like abracadabra and magic.

Ollie ollie oxen free made those hiding people appear.

Right.

So this is part of the game. People are still out there. You can’t find them. You’re giving up. You shout ollie ollie oxen free, and then they come in.

Right.

You call the spies in from the cold.

However, a friend of mine who grew up in the panhandle of Texas said that she was told to say, all that’s out, come in free.

Oh, wow.

Almost the perfect, pure, original version of it.

That’s pretty cool.

Well, what you were saying is actually the corruption, basically, of what your friend says.

Okay.

But it seems like everybody says that corruption.

Well, not just that one. There’s a lot of corruption. They’re all over the place.

In the work that we quote frequently from the Dictionary of American Regional English, you can look this up.

And I don’t even have all of them here, but it’s probably 20 or 30 variants set around the country for this particular expression.

And all of them originate from something along the lines of all that are out come in free.

I mean, you can come in and you’re not considered it.

To me, it seems the corruption is more fun.

I agree.

In general.

There’s something musical about the way. More like a game than all that’s out come in free.

Yeah.

That kind of sounds like you’re playing hide-and-seek with the queen or something.

That’s good.

Your version is musical. There’s something nice to it.

But there’s some common ones that are said in particular parts of the country.

For example, in the West and in California and a few of the Western states, they say ollie, ollie, A-L-L-E-E, oxen free.

And oxen, O-X-E-N.

So it’s a really complete corruption there.

So there’s a bunch of these that are a little more common than the other ones.

But the long list, all free, home free, all outs, come in free, all in free, ollie ollie in free, come in free, come on in, come on in.

That’s a boring one.

Come on, get with it.

It is, it is.

Olli, Olli, Olsen free.

You know that was in the Norwegian part.

I thought that perhaps my friend was the only one who had parents who were grammatically correct.

No, that’s the original.

And the reason this happens is really super interesting.

And this is, there’s language that’s transmitted through writing.

And this tends to be transmitted almost perfectly from person to person, from teacher to student, from parent to child, that sort of thing.

But then there’s the language that doesn’t usually show up on paper.

And this language is heavily corrupted.

It doesn’t take very long before the original doesn’t look very much like its descendants.

It’s like a game of telephone.

It literally is.

So that I say something to a line of 20 people and by the time it reaches that 20th person, the message sounds just very different.

Even if people are trying to be faithful to what they thought they heard.

It sounds like we’re both correct then.

This is making me want to go play hide-and-go-seek.

I haven’t played that in decades.

All right, you go, and I’ll count.

I’ll come find you tomorrow.

Celia, good luck and good health to you.

I hope everything gets better soon, all right?

Oh, I’m sure it will.

Thank you very much.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

If you’ve got a question about something you learned as a child and are confused by as an adult, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or tell us the whole thing in email to words@waywordradio.org.