Truce terms

Truce terms are words or short phrases accepted within a community of children as an effective way of calling for a temporary respite or truce during a game or activity. Common examples in the UK are barley, fainites and kings, often accompanied by the crossing of fingers on one or both hands. Traditionally these terms are specific to certain geographical areas although some, such as pax, may be used by a particular social group. More recently the use of "time-out" has become prevalent in some English speaking cultures. Examples of use of truce terms are if a child has a stitch or wants to raise a point on the rules of the game.
Truce terms are recorded as having been used in the following circumstances; being out of breath, having a stitch, a shoelace being undone, fear of clothes being damaged, needing to go to the lavatory, checking the time, wanting to discuss or clarify rules during a fight or game, or one combatant wanting to remove their spectacles or jacket before continuing. It does not mean to surrender, although it may sometimes be used in preparation to surrendering.[1] Truce terms are only used within a specific age group, have little currency outside that group and are by and large abandoned by the age of 10 or 11 years.[2] Folklorists Iona and Peter Opie, who in 1959 conducted the most extensive study on the subject to date, considered the truce term to be the most important word in a schoolchild's vocabulary and one for which there was no adult equivalent.[1] However, research into early recorded use of these terms found examples of some of these terms being used as a sign of surrender in battle or adult fights as late as the 18th century.[3]
The vocabulary of children's games, including truce terms are described by sociolinguist Peter Trudgill in Dialects of England as being particularly rich in regional variation insofar as they are not based on official or television culture.[4] They are an example of the subculture of young children which is transmitted by word of mouth.[5]
In some places, more than one term was current and often four or five were known, although usually only one term predominated. Schools bordering two linguistic regions honoured both. The words used in urban areas were often at odds with words used in the surrounding countryside. The Opies recorded around 45 truce terms plus variations. The most widely used were barley, fainites, kings, crosses, keys, skinch, cree and scribs.[1]
Barley was recorded by the Opies as the prevailing term in east Scotland and the Borders, the Lake District, north-west England, west midlands and in Wales, apart from the south east of Wales where cree prevailed. There were many variations such as barley-bay, barley-bees, barlow or barrels. The use of barlay as a truce term appears in the fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight and Tobias Smollett's The Reprisal. It is recorded specifically as a term used to demand truce by children in lexicographer John Jamieson's 1808 Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language.
Fainites and fains (or vainites and vains) predominated in London and throughout southern England, apart from the scribs and screams of east Hampshire, and extended north as far as Olney in Buckinghamshire. Variations included fennits, fannies, fainsies, faylines, vainlights and vainyards. Notes and Queries reported in 1870 that fains was in common use by London schoolboys. Faints appeared in an 1889 dictionary of slang and fainits in 1891. According to philologist J. R. R. Tolkien, the term derives from the "medieval term "fein I", descended in turn from the Old French se feindre, "to make excuses, hang back or back out of battle". He also proposes that this use of the term throws light on line 529 of the Clerk's Tale by Chaucer that "lordes heestes mowe nat been yfeyned" (the lords orders cannot be treated with a 'fain I'; in other words, declined).[1] Another translation of the Anglo-Norman word "feindre" is "pretend, feign, turn a blind eye too", which is what the more powerful child does whilst granting respite.[2]
Kings was common in eastern England. The English Dialect Dictionary recorded much the same in the nineteenth century. Queens is recorded as used in the kings area, sometimes as an alternative and sometimes as indicating readiness to restart the game.[1] Kings truce is found in Thomas Dekker's The Honest Whore, Part One (II,i), which appeared in I604. The term is used in the play to halt a quarrel.[6]
Crosses, cruces, creases and cree were found in a broad band across England from cree in South Wales and both sides of the Bristol Channel, creases in Berkshire, and cruce or cruces from Gloucester through to Oxford, to crosses in Lincolnshire. There are some areas of scruces, screwsies or screws in Essex and Suffolk. The Opies saw creases as a transitional word.[1]
Exes, used around Ipswich and Norwich, was thought to be a variant of crosses.[1]
Skinch or skinge predominated in Northumberland and Durham, another term first recorded in a nineteenth-century dialect dictionary.[1]
Keys was found by the Opies to be the prevailing term in western Scotland and in a strip running through north-west England in an otherwise predominantly barley area.[1]
Scribs or squibs coverered an area from Hampshire, to West Sussex and Surrey. Other Hampshire variants were scrims, screens, scrames, screams and creams.[1]
Pax, (latin for "peace"), was a group dialect word rather than a regional one as it was predominantly used in private schools and school stories.[1]
Many individual cities, towns and rural districts had their own words, not used elsewhere such as bees, blobs, croggies, denny, keppies, locks, peas, peril, nix and twigs.[1]
Post-Opie UK studies
A study undertaken in Lincolnshire in 1974 confirmed the Opies findings.[7] However, a later study undertaken in Croydon, Surrey in 1988 found the use of truce terms much less uniform. Croydon is firmly in the fainites area on the Opies map, but in 1988 fainites was only the third most commonly used term. The most common terms were pax (30%), jecs (25%), fainites (20%) and cross keys (2%). Jecs is a term not recorded by the Opies at all and there was some evidence that it derived from the word "injection". Fainites was more known than used and was reported by one teacher to be "totally lacking in street credibility". Pax was no longer a group word as reported by the Opies. Other terms reported included pips, force field and quits. The authors concluded that either the Opies had grossly oversimplified the picture or things had radically changed in 30 years (some seven to eight generations of primary school children). They also noted that although some schools reported a marked preference for a particular term, all schools reported at least some children using different terms.[8]
[edit] Gestures


Crossed fingers are a common gesture accompanying truce terms in the UK, New Zealand and the USA.
The Opies found that in England and Wales children usually held up crossed fingers. Sometimes crossing the fingers of both hands was required and occasionally the feet as well. These were crossed fingers of one hand (44%), crossed fingers of both hands (26%), thumbs through fingers (6%) (boys only) and arms crossed across the chest (2%). Other gestures, reported in ones and twos, included miming an injection into the arm, licking the thumb, making a T-shape with the hands, three fingers held up and the "Vulcan" sign from Star Trek. Virtually all schools reported the use of crossed fingers.[8]
The holding up of one hand with middle and index fingers crossed was the usual gesture found in New Zealand in 1999–2001. The T-shape was also used when saying time-out.[9] In the USA, although the more modern time-out has largely supplanted traditional terms, the crossed fingers gesture remains common.[10]
[edit] 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).[9] 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.[9] 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. [9]
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.[9]
[edit] USA
In a study undertaken by historians Mary and Herbert Knapp in the 1970's, informants remembering terms from the 1930s reported kings X and kings. The use of kings X before the 1930s is well recorded.[10] 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.[3]
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.[6] The Dictionary of American Regional English cites the Opies as a source of an explanation of 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. [3] 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 concluded that kings X derived from the users of kings and exes settling in the same areas of the USA and the terms combining and shortening. Kings cruse, once popular in the USA might be accounted for in a similar manner.[10]
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 USA 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 into the playground 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 giving truce terms used by them in the 1960s reported anything other than time-out and its derivatives. The few alternatives included pax, safe, base or home-base and freeze. The Knapps reported that time-out had, since the 1950s, supplanted kings ex as the most popular truce term.[10]
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.[10]
Truce terms
Words which are accepted amongst a group of children as a valid way of calling a temporary truce during the course of a game or other activity, and thereby claiming immunity from being caught, touched, etc. lona and Peter Opie were the first to attempt a systematic look at this aspect of what they termed children's ‘code of oral legislation’, and their fieldwork in the 1950s brought striking results. A range of words were found, but their use was markedly regional and they were able to present a map showing the dominant words in each area (see Opie and Opie, 1959: 149). The word with the widest distribution was ‘barley’, which has a very long literary history, and others were ‘fainites’ (probably from Middle English), ‘kings’, ‘kings and crosses’, ‘skinch’, ‘scribs’, and ‘cree’. The small survey reported by Beckwith and Shirley confirmed and extended the Opies' findings for Lincolnshire in 1974, but an even smaller-scale survey by Kate and Steve Roud in 1988 completely disagreed. Their research focused on the London Borough of Croydon—which in the 1950s was firmly in the ‘fainites’ area—and they discovered three widely used terms: ‘jecs’ (previously unrecorded), ‘pax’ (previously thought to be only used in private schools), and ‘fainites’ a definitely poor third. Without further research, it is impossible to say whether the geographical pattern reported by the Opies has completely broken down, or whether the Croydon area is anomalous. It is quite conceivable that major changes have taken place in the nearly 30 years between the Opies' and the Rouds' research, as seven or eight generations of schoolchildren have passed through the country's junior schools in that time, which is the equivalent of over 140 years in adult generation terms.In most historical sources, it is taken for granted that the truce word is accompanied by crossing the fingers, and in many cases the truce only lasts while the fingers remain crossed. Again the Croydon survey revealed several other gestures, although crossed fingers was by far the most common. At some schools, boys and girls made different gestures. Further work on truce terms is certainly needed.
World of the Mind: gestures
Movements of the body that signal intentions, commands, or comments — or suggestions, which may be rude or crude. Human gestures form a rich body language. Some are innate, and probably derive from purely functional movements, such as picking something up, turning the head to look in a different direction, or hitting something hard. No doubt these functional movements were read by other members in a social group as indicating states and needs, and then they became developed as more or less conventional signs for conveying emotional states, intentions, commands, and so on. Although there is a genetic basis, the role of learning is clear because some gestures are specific to geographical regions, or to particular groups or families. People moving into a new area or marrying into a family will pick up some of their characteristic gestures.The biological basis of gesture was pointed out in Charles Darwin's masterpiece, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), which suggests that many symbolic gestures are derived from functional behaviour. Their development may sometimes be traced through the use of individual or groups of muscles for purposes which changed in the evolution of species.It is remarkable that artists, and especially cartoonists, can convey so much by recording a gesture even with just a few lines. It follows that gestures can be signalled and read from small changes of position of the limbs or body; some gestures may be recognized even at night or with the corner of the eye. Evidently we are well attuned in reading and responding to human gestures, which sometimes indicate vitally important intentions, sometimes a state of hope or fear, and sometimes doubt or confidence in those around us. It is necessary that it should be so, for the well-being and survival of any group.Human gestures have been described and classified in considerable detail; for various regions, social classes and occupations, especially by Desmond Morris (1977, Morris et al. 1979). The range of social gestures is vast: 'the nose thumb', 'the eyelid pull', the vertical and horizontal 'horn sign', the 'palmback V-sign' and many more. It has also been shown how some of them have spread geographically, sometimes over several centuries.
Crossing fingers
The act of crossing the fingers (i.e. middle finger over index finger) ‘for luck’, or to ward off ill luck (e.g. after walking under a ladder) is one of our most well-understood gestures, although we may often say it—‘I'll cross my fingers for you’— rather than actually carry out the action. Morris shows that the gesture is understood by some on mainland Europe but is only commonly found in Britain and parts of Scandinavia. Given its ubiquity in this country, it is surprising to find that the earliest reference found by Opie and Tatem only dated from 1912 (Leather, 1912: 88), where it is already linked to the ladder superstition. See thumb for an older gesture, of similar protective nature. One sphere in which crossed fingers are still taken seriously is in the school playground, used as a protective action to accompany a truce term to obtain temporary respite in a game. One of the popular explanations for the gesture's origin is that it dates from classical times when Christians were persecuted for their religion, and crossing the fingers was a secret way of invoking the cross. Given its late appearance, restricted distribution, and the fact that crossed fingers bear no relation to the shape of a cross, the explanation is completely unfounded.