Tick-Tacking and Other Pranks

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Monica Barber.

Monica, where are you calling from?

I’m calling from Lexington, Kentucky.

Lexington, Kentucky. Well, welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

Well, I listen to your show every week.

Yay.

And I came up with a term that we used as kids all the time in my little hometown in northern Kentucky.

And since I’ve moved away, I have not found another person who knows what I’m talking about when I talk about tic-tacking.

Tic-tacking. And Monica, what northern Kentucky town is that?

Augusta, Kentucky, population 1,500.

Okay. All right. Well, tell us about tic-tacking.

Okay. So about maybe two to three weeks before Halloween, all the young kids, maybe preteen and teens,

Maybe around 13 years old and older, go out and just cause mischief around the town.

And so you might do things like the most popular soaping car windows or, if you’re really brave, house windows.

And so for a few weeks before, we would go get corn out of the farmer’s field that was all hard for the cattle.

And we would shell the corn into bags and save it up.

And so you might run down the street and throw corn on somebody’s front porch, you know, and then watch the lights come on.

And the funny thing is our parents did it, our grandparents did it, and they encourage it.

And they like to tell stories about when they were kids.

My dad’s favorite story is taking manure and putting it in a paper bag and setting it on fire on someone’s porch.

Seriously?

And then when they’d come out, they’d stomp it.

And, yes, he encouraged us to do those things.

They thought it was hilarious.

Did they have a name for the manure-in-the-bag trick?

No, it’s just generally called tic-tac-ing.

Okay, okay.

And you might say, hey, do you want to go tic-tac-ing tonight,

Or do you want to tic-tac the barber’s house tonight, things like that.

And so when I moved away, I’ve asked people, have you ever heard of tic-tac-ing,

And I have not found another person outside of my little hometown that knows about tic-tac-ing.

Well, we can tell you, Monica, that there is a long tradition of tic-tac-ing both in this country and in the UK.

And it has to do with exactly what you’re talking about, specifically wrapping on windows, finding different ways to wrap on windows.

It’s sometimes called window tacking.

And you can do that, of course, by throwing hard corn kernels at somebody’s window.

But, you know, kids are really ingenious when it comes to coming up with devices to execute these kinds of pranks.

And window tacking can involve all kinds of different things.

Like there’s one method where you take a wooden spool and you take all the thread off the spool and you cut notches in the circumference of either side of the spool.

And then you wind it with twine and you put it up near a window.

And put a pencil through the hole of the spool and yank on that string that’s around the spool,

And it makes a rapping noise.

Don’t give me ideas. I might go back and tic-tac.

And it’s supposed to be really annoying.

And the nice thing about these little devices that kids come up with to do tic-tacking in one way or another

Is that you can run away really quickly.

You know, they’re lightweight, and you can just do that tic-tac-ing on the window and then run away.

Probably before we got our driver’s license.

So it was in that age period where you had to run quickly to get away.

And the townspeople just turned a blind eye.

You know, they just laugh and say, oh, it’s those kids just tic-tac-ing and harmless.

Good clean fun, huh?

And what was your method for tic-tac-ing?

I like the barbed soap and the corn on the porch.

Oh, I see.

Because some people would use paraffin, and then you can’t wash that off the window.

So we stuck with more harmless things that could be cleaned up.

Would you write things?

You would write things, but mostly, depending on who it was,

Just try to soap it up really good on the front windshield,

And then just make circles on all the rest of the windows.

I wouldn’t mind having that done to my car.

It’s kind of a mess.

Monica, thank you for this stroll down memory lane.

I’m sure a lot of people are going to be remembering those nights.

I hope other people have heard of it from other parts of the country.

Well, we will hear about it.

Okay, good.

Thanks, Monica.

Thank you. Bye.

One of my favorite books of all time, seriously,

I mean, at least as far as reference works go,

Is The Loren Language of Schoolchildren by Iona and Peter Opie from 1959.

And they have a page or two on Tic-Tac-ing,

And they have a ton of names for this,

Which I don’t need to get into here, but they describe it as using a push pin and a string

To push the string into the pane of a window, and you have a button knotted onto that string,

And you’re on the other end of the string, like hiding in the bushes or something,

And you’re slowly letting that button tap against the window.

Tap, tap, tap.

Because it’s hard to see when you’re looking out at night what’s causing the tapping,

And it can be pretty freaky, maybe even scary, right?

Right.

Well, you know, they’ve got Tic Tac-ing where you are.

I know they do.

Maybe they have Devil’s Night, and they’ve got something else.

Cabbage night.

Cabbage night.

Pranks that you get up to, oh, around Halloween or so.

Call us.

We want to hear about those pranks, what you called them, where you learned them, who’s

Doing them now, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.