Skee-Ball Slang

Martha, do you remember skee-ball?

Skee-ball?

Yeah, you go to the fair or the carnival and there’s this ramp. You roll the ball up and it drops into these circles and maybe you get points if it goes down the hole.

No, I didn’t know what that was called. And then the machine spits out the tickets and then you go get some piece of junk like a shot glass with the Led Zeppelin logo on the side.

You know what I’m talking about?

I want the giant panda.

Yeah, that kind of stuff. Well, skee-ball is now a competitive sport. There are skeeball leagues in the country, and naturally, of course, they have a lingo, and I’ve been getting into that recently.

I bet. I bet they have drinks that go along with it, too. There’s a skeeball league in Wilmington, North Carolina, and I’ve been reading their MySpace page, and they’re using terms like hundos or hundies.

And this is their abbreviation for 100 points. It’s one of the hardest holes to hit on a skeeball table. It’s small, and it’s placed difficultly, and if you drop your ball in that hole, you get 100 points.

Oh, wow. So if you do something successfully, you say, I hit the hundo?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. A hundy. A hundy or a hundo.

A hundy. I like that. And find the 40 is a motto that they’re using, which means go for the easy 40-point shots instead of going for the really difficult 100-point shots.

Because you can just accumulate a lot of 40s and ultimately win the game by the easy shots.

Oh, cool. Well, there you go. If you’re not any good at it, at least you’ll know the lingo, right?

Skee-ball. It’s great. I want to league. I want to join.

Do you have a pastime or hobby that’s got a cool lingo? I would love to hear about it.

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