Truce Term - New Zealand

New Zealand

A study undertaken between 1999 and 2001 in New Zealand by lexicographers Laurie and Winifred Bauer on traditional forms of play included truce terms. The terms they described in their study were regional and the most common were pegs (widespread), twigs (Taranaki), gates (Auckland), tags (Nelson Marlborough), and nibs (Otago-Southland). In Wellington schools the dominant term was fans, recorded in New Zealand before 1920, which the authors state derives from fains or fain it as described by the Opies, itself dating back to Chaucerian times. The most widespread term was pegs, derived from pax. Apparently unrecorded before World War II this appears to have first changed to pags, probably from being shouted out at length, and then further mutated by virtue of broad New Zealand accents to pegs. The Bauers thought the most likely hypothesis for the use of this rather upper class term from the UK, was that it derived from books and stories about UK public schools. Similarly they thought nibs derived from nix, possibly via nigs, originally from South Africa though unknown to the Opies save for a very small area of nicks possibly from nicklas. Nix is also UK public school slang though not as a truce term. Nixs and flix were recorded as having been described by a South African boy as prevalent in South Africa, and were thought by a South African linguist to have derived from an Afrikaans term.

Many of the common truce terms recorded by the Bauers such as bags, poison, gates, tags, flicks, are not listed by the Opies although they speculated that both bags and tags may derive from pax.