United States
In a study undertaken by historians Mary and Herbert Knapp in the 1970s, informants remembering terms from the 1930s reported kings X and kings. The use of kings X before the 1930s is well-recorded. The 1985 edition of the Dictionary of American Regional English records the historical use of kings ex, kings sax, kings cruse, kings excuse and kings, chiefly west of the Mississippi River, the Gulf States and Ohio Valley. The earliest recorded use cited in the dictionary is of kings cruse in 1778 during an adult fight.
Scholarly speculation in the late nineteenth century postulated that kings X derived from kings truce, rendered as kings cruse and then kings excuse, becoming kings X as a shortened form. The Dictionary of American Regional English cites the Opies as a source for the derivation of the terms and states that exes probably refers to the use of crossed fingers, an important part of the demand for a truce, rather than deriving from "excuse" as originally thought. However, the Knapps state that although the Opies do not record kings X as such in the UK, they do record kings, crosses, exes, cruse and truce. They conclude that kings X derived from the users of kings and exes settling in the same areas of the US—the terms were then combined and shortened. Kings cruse, once popular in the US, might be accounted for in a similar manner. Barley has been recorded as a truce term in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Virginia.
The Knapps study in Monroe County, Indiana, found time-out and times to be by far the most prevalent terms in the 1970s. Variations included I've got times and time. Very few children reported the more traditional kings, queens or I've got kings X. The authors also reported that these terms were popular over many areas of the US and in American schools abroad. To be functional a truce term must be understood and honoured by most of the children playing together. Time-out clearly derives from the use of intermissions in timed sports and apparently came into the language with the popularization of organized or timed sports and with the advent of such sports in elementary schools and on television. Historically the earliest reports for the use of time-out or time as a truce term were 1935 and 1936. However, only a small number of respondents reported anything other than time-out and its derivatives in use during the 1960s. The few alternatives included pax, safe, base or home-base and freeze with one small area of fins (Mount Vernon). The Knapps reported that time-out had, since the 1950s, supplanted kings ex as the most popular truce term.
The use of times rather than time-out and I've got times rather than I call time appears to have been influenced by older forms such as kings and I've got kings X. There was also one report of times X. Similarly derivatives of time-out are often accompanied by the traditional crossed fingers.
Read more about this topic: Truce Term
Famous quotes related to united states:
“I do not know that the United States can save civilization but at least by our example we can make people think and give them the opportunity of saving themselves. The trouble is that the people of Germany, Italy and Japan are not given the privilege of thinking.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“It is said that the British Empire is very large and respectable, and that the United States are a first-rate power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind every man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition. In America, this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency than anyone else thereby gains social access to the President of the United States.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)
“In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“Greece is a sort of American vassal; the Netherlands is the country of American bases that grow like tulip bulbs; Cuba is the main sugar plantation of the American monopolies; Turkey is prepared to kow-tow before any United States pro-consul and Canada is the boring second fiddle in the American symphony.”
—Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko (1909–1989)