Adults love to wish out loud that they could return to the safety and simplicity of childhood. I hear a lot of these wishes at this time of year, when an overnight snowfall does not mean hearing the telephone ring at 6:30 in the morning, burrowing farther under the covers, and offering up a sleepy prayer that your mom will tiptoe into your room and whisper at your lumpy form, “Snow day!” so that you can divide the day between the soap operas you usually get to watch only when you stay home sick from school and the hill in the backyard, which you climb up and sled down and climb up again until your leg muscles scream in pain and your snowpants have soaked clear through, and as you disentangle yourself from the pricker bush at the bottom of the sled run for the seventy-eighth time and try to dislodge the metric ton of snow that has gone down your front and your little brother storms inside to tell on you even though you obviously didn’t mean to hit him in the face with that snowball and you have absolutely no idea how those little bits of gravel got stuck into the snowball either, you actually find yourself looking forward to going back to school for the first time in weeks. Rather, an overnight snowfall means digging your car out and slithering to work, or putting on an extra pair of pantyhose and slithering to work, arriving at work, and finding out not only that your boss has elected not to bother slithering to work, but also that every single one of your co-workers had a worse time slithering to work than you did and they would really like to tell you all about it, and you put your head down on your desk and wonder what ever became of your old headmaster with the itchy snow-chain finger who would call school off if so much as a single flake meandered past his bedroom window, and then you slither home and the IRS has sent you a little note that reads, “Dear Resident: You have three months to fork it over. Love, the Internal Revenue Service.”

Okay, so I miss snow days a lot, and not having to cook for myself, but I remember childhood as complicated – not unhappy, but complex, with more inexplicable and inviolable rules than the tax code. Kids have their own vocabulary and their own ideas about keeping order in their universe. So, just in case any of you wishes to return to childhood and has your wish granted (or if you just want to inject some immaturity into your daily routine), I’ve prepared a two-part primer of kid precepts. This week, I’ve compiled a working dictionary of sorts; next week, I’ll cover necessary regression skills. You can keep your protestations of “grow up” – I tell you, this stuff works.

IMPORTANT TERMS

No cutsies. Kids believe in justice, and they have a whole brace of quaint ways in which they ensure that “fairness” prevails. Kids spend a great deal of time waiting in line so that harried grown-ups can herd them from one vaguely annoying supervised activity to the next, and the jockeying for position can get pretty fierce, so any child daring to join a line anywhere except at its end can expect to hear an indignant howl of “heeeeey, no cutsies” from his peers. Unless he has tried to cut in behind his best friend (best friends get cutsies), the line will lock arms and close ranks against the child, forcing him to go to the end. Considering how rigidly elementary schoolers enforce this rule amongst themselves, you’d think they’d remember it twenty years later when they try to slide in front of me at the post office, but they don’t.

No backsies. Looking back on it, I can’t believe we abided by this rule, but if another kid gives you something undesirable – a piece of trash picked up on the playground, or the crust of her sandwich – and says “no backsies” during the transfer, you can’t hand it back to her. Other kids nearby will then hastily declare “no givesies,” which means you can’t give it to them either. A group of kids can team up to stick one kid at their lunch table with their trash if they use “no backsies” and “no givesies” in concert. Try this at the office – other adults will
think you’ve lost your mind and you’ll probably get away with it.

Big whoop. Children enjoy appearing blasÈ and difficult to impress. They usually use “big whoop” to disguise their naked envy when another kid gets a new Atari, or to convey a pronounced lack of awe when another kid can do something that they can’t. For example, if you execute a nifty dismount from the monkey bars, your friends will shrug indifferently and say, “Big whoop.” Other cuttingly dismissive rejoinders include, “So? That’s cinchy,” and, “My little sister could do that.”

Nyah nyah nyah nyaaahh nyaaahh. Few grade-school kids could successfully define the word “schadenfreude” if asked, but you had better believe they know what it means. Furthermore, they have even less interest in disguising their glee at another’s misfortune than most grown-ups (viz. Nelson’s gratified “HA ha” on The Simpsons). Taunting another kid she knows she can outrun, cackling as another kid gets in trouble – nothing pleases the average child more. If you listen carefully, you can hear adults chanting “nyah nyah nyah nyaaahh nyaaahh” when other adults who just cut them off get pulled over by a cop.

Cruddy. Younger children use “crud” and “cruddy” as a catch-all term for stuff that sucks, but of course, they would say “stuff that stinks,” because younger children still fear the consequences of cursing.

Cooties and cootie shots. For reasons I still don’t quite understand, kids constantly accuse one another of “having cooties.” Only a cootie shot from a friend can cure a kid of cooties. Kids will also decide, entirely at random, that a classmate has cooties, and will instruct the rest of the class to avoid their plague-ridden comrade; eventually, either the ringleader will lose interest or someone will take pity on the quarantined kid and give him a cootie shot.

Eeny meeny miney moe. An age-old selection process, this chant also derives from a kid’s sense of fair play. Kids use the entire poem, “Eeny meeny miney moe / Catch a tiger by the toe / If he hollers, let him go / Eeny meeny miney moe / My mother says to pick the very best one and you are it,” to decide who gets stuck doing something nobody in the group wants to do, or to choose who receives the last cookie. Kids follow the law of “eeny meeny miney moe” to the letter and seldom ask for . . .

Do-overs. Again, the concept of justice comes into play. Young children have Communist hearts; everyone must receive the exact same chances to do things, the exact same size piece of cake, and so on. As a result, games played with kids frequently take entire afternoons, since hardly a minute will pass without someone filing a do-over, at which point someone else objects to the do-over, and the do-over must then receive a full trial in the court of public opinion.

Brittany and Dylan, sitting in a tree. Kids revel in bathroom humor of the most revolting and ingenious sort, but insinuate that they “like” a member of the opposite sex and they recoil in horror. Singing “Brittany and Dylan, sittin’ in a tree / K-I-S-S-I-N-G / First comes love, then comes marriage / Then comes [classmate’s name, demonstrating woefully incomplete understanding of the reproductive process] in a baby carriage” will prompt all the blood in a kid’s body to rush to his or her face. Accusing the kid of “being in love with” someone can prompt the same reaction, but it does not last as long or annoy adults as much.

Baby-baby and liar-liar. If a contemptuous “big whoop” doesn’t shut the schoolyard braggart up, a rendition of “liar, liar, pants on fire” ordinarily does the trick, although it tends to degenerate rather quickly into an am-not-are-so-nuh-uh-yeah-huh fight, and these last until a teacher or parent intercedes. Another devastating song cuts the non-stoics on the playground down to size; any child resorting to tears inevitably hears, “Baby, baby, stick your head in gravy / Wrap it up in bubble-gum and send it to the Navy.” I skipped a grade in school, and as a result I had to sit through this song dozens of times, even if I hadn’t started crying.

(Part The Second)

Welcome to Part Two of “Greasy Kid Stuff.” (I have to credit WFMU for the “GKS” name – check out the Greasy Kid Stuff show in streaming
audio right here. Thanks also to the Biscuit and TT1WA for their contributions.) Last week, I covered part of the important terminology of childhood, and observed that kids have the right idea a lot of the time. Let’s face it – if adults observed cardinal rules like “no cutsies” and “no backsies,” it would make the world a much happier place to live in. This week, I’ll take a look at other important principles of elementary school, and again, many of these make a lot of sense for grown-ups.

MORE IMPORTANT TERMS

“I called it.” If you want something, you had damn well better call it; if someone else called it, you had damn well better not take it, period. The Call reigns supreme whenever the possession of a cookie, a favored piece of playground equipment, a superior toy, or a spot in the front seat comes into question. If a kid successfully “calls” one of these things, he can rest assured that he will get it, because other kids won’t challenge a call. Frequently, however, a dispute will arise as to who exactly forced the words out first, at which point the parties will appeal to other kids. Children do not appreciate adult interference on a call; I distinctly recall my annoyance when I “called the front” for the remainder of the calendar year, only to have my mother intercede on my brother’s behalf. “But, Ma,” I explained with not a little exasperation, “I called it.”

Jinx! Jinxes vary by age and region, but by and large, if you say the exact same thing at the exact same time as another kid, one of you can “jinx” the other. In my day, if you got jinxed, you couldn’t talk until the other kid said your entire name. I hated this, because I had a family middle name that nobody could ever guess, so I had to shake my head for the better part of half an hour while the other kids asked, “Dolores? Diana? Deirdre? Delia?” and finally they’d get bored and let me write it down, and then they would all make fun of me: “That’s a BOY name! Saaaaarah has a BOOOOOOY’S name!” Yeah, like I had so much choice in the matter. Anyhow. Other people use the “jinx personal jinx!” approach, which I think means you get to smack the jinxee; still others say, “Jinx! Pinch! Poke! You owe me a Coke!” and then they pinch and poke the jinxee.

Wait up! Inevitably, when making your getaway, you will hear that one slow kid behind you huffing, “Hey – hey, you guys! Wait up!” You like this kid, but sometimes he makes it hard for your pack of friends to travel, because either he doesn’t run very fast or he’s just a little slow on the uptake. After one particularly narrow escape, we all stopped to get our breath and wait for the rear guard to catch up, and my friend Red philosophized, “You’re only as fast as the fat kid.” Exactly.

Dares. Kids dare other kids to do stuff that they themselves would prefer not to do, because they could injure themselves or – even worse – get in trouble. The darer usually banks on the daree “chickening out,” because if the daree takes the dare and gets away with it, the darer looks like an idiot. If, however, the daree declines the dare, the darer can (and will) taunt the daree by chanting, “Bok bok bok! Bok bok buh-COCK! Bok bok buh-COCK!” Because I was a year younger than the other kids, I got dared a lot, and I usually took the dares; the way I saw it, either I would “do the dare” and the little snot-nose who had dared me would have to shut up, or I would die while trying to do the dare, but either way, I wouldn’t have to hear that obnoxious “bok bok bok” business. Kids without as much to prove double-dared or dog-dared the original darer; really confident kids sniffed, “I could do it if I wanted, but I just don’t feel like it right now.” Other options included stalling for time until the end of recess, or, in cases of true desperation, saying that your parents “didn’t let you” accept dares, but these strategies did not necessarily circumvent the bok-bok-bokking.

Different ways to say “duh.” William Safire actually wrote up “duh” in his column a couple of years ago, so I won’t belabor the point, but variations on “duh” included “doi” (and its opposite, “no doi”) and “duh hickey.” “Duh” and “no duh” had two functions: to bolster a kid’s color-me-unimpressed cred, and to give a kid a G-rated way to say “no shit.”

STUFF YOU NEED TO KNOW HOW TO DO

Playing four-square.

Rules (including fine print) for every single board game in Toys ëR’ Us.

Riding your bike with no hands. You should also practice riding up even the steepest hill without getting off to push your bike, balancing several friends on various parts of your bike, and the all-important time-saver flying mount/dismount.

All rules, appeals, regional variations, and time-out loopholes of Tag.

Capture The Flag.

Writing in code.

Defending yourself in a tickle fight.

Speaking in Pig Latin. Other secret languages don’t give nearly the thrill of hissing “uck-fay ou-yay” across a crowded homeroom, but they’ll do in a pinch, as long as they satisfy the requirement of allowing you to talk about someone else right in front of them.

(Girls Only)

Jump rope tricks. You should know both “alone jumps” and jumps you do in the middle while two other girls “turn” for you; you get a bonus for doing double-dutch, especially if you don’t leave half the skin on your knees on the pavement.

Hand games. Miss Merry Mack, Bo-Bo-Ski-Wotten-Totten, and Miss Lucy all required; others optional.

Jacks and Chinese checkers. You should own your own set; if you can’t get up to “sevensies” without messing up, don’t bother playing – unless, of course, you can redeem yourself by making bracelets out of Chinese checkers.

French braiding.

Cootie catcher fortune fold-ups. How else can you find out who “likes” whom, and who will get to marry Donny Osmond when you all grow up?

M-A-S-H. Same principle, but with no pesky origami between you and your future (you live in a shack with Leif Garrett and 17 kids and you drive a Pacer? Ha ha haaaa!).

Ranking your friends. In grammar school, girls have lots of best friends. In fact, ALL of their friends have “best friend” status, but in a certain order. Your real best friend is your “first best” friend, the girl you like next most is your “second best” friend, and so on. These allegiances change from day to day, and all your friends know their “rank” and make sure you know yours; girls often confer Five Families-style on the playground, to determine rankings or to agree to stop being first best friends. Unfortunately, by junior high school, the forthrightness of this process disappears, but the process itself continues – you just don’t know where you stand anymore. Looking for the origins of the average eating disorder? Look no farther.

(Boys Only)

Jumping off a diving board and catching a ball thrown at you from the apron of a pool, while disporting your limbs in the most painful manner possible. This means walking that fine line between getting as much air (and splash height) as possible and getting busted by the pool manager for “rough-housing.” Note: don’t keep playing this game after you start shaving. Girls don’t like it.

Proper administration of an Indian burn. Generally, boys reserve this for littler kids and girls they kind of like.

Spitting.

Putting things in your ears and nostrils when bored.

Going off the high-dive. A girl didn’t have to do this unless she had a crush on her friend’s older brother, in which case she conquered her terror in the hopes of impressing him. But boys had to master the cannonball, the jack-knife, and a number of other water-
displacement techniques, because who knew what might happen if he could just drench his friend’s older sister that he had a crush on? Ah, chlorinated romance.

OTHER AMUSEMENTS TO FILL THE TIME UNTIL YOU CAN DRIVE

Making forts out of sofa cushions and blankets.

Spending all your allowance on, hoarding, and bingeing on candy.

Trading stuff. I made a similar comment about the concept of schadenfreude last week, but even if kids can’t define “free-market economy,” they understand how it works. Supply and demand, price wars, interest rates – my classmates in Mrs. Stropp’s fourth-grade homeroom and I employed all of these concepts in order to bolster our scratch-n-sniff collections. No, you probably can’t explain pure capitalism to the average nine-year-old, but ten minutes on the floor of the puffy-sticker market in our classroom would have told you that we had the idea down. We had mergers to strengthen our positions; we staged leveraged buyouts of other people’s sticker books; we stalked around muttering things like, “I gotta unload these Garfields,” and, “She’s talking to Jen about the rainbow reflectives – we’re waiting to hear,” and, “So, I heard you took a bath on those mini- jellybeans. That sucks.” Other tradable items included sports cards, Wacky Packs, Cracker Jack prizes, and just about any other small novelty that other kids collected (like Pogs or Beanie Babies).

Rising at dawn on Saturday to watch every single cartoon. Kids always try to spend the entire morning in front of the TV, but the parental obsession with fresh air and the possibility of your brain rotting usually made this impossible. The unadulterated bliss of cartoon-watching ended one of three ways: 1) Soul Train came on; 2) your mother sent you out with your father to run errands (not all that bad, because Dad brought you to the dump and let you throw bottles, as long as you swore up and down not to tell your mother and not to “horse around”); 3) your mother pointed out the “beautiful day outside” and then made you go outside to play in it. You also had to get up early on Sunday mornings and watch David And Goliath and PTL Club, because if they decided to change their minds and broadcast cartoons on Sunday mornings, and you missed it, you’d feel left out at school on Monday.

Spelling curse words upside down on the calculator.

Making a huge volume of prank calls. I feel sorry for kids today, now that everyone has caller ID and *69. Back in the day, before telecommunications got child-proofed, my friends and I had the most fun you could with your clothes on – torturing innocent people with last names like “Lipschitz” and “Butts,” trying to send twenty pepperoni pizzas to our gym teacher (don’t worry, Mom – this never worked), dialing random numbers and belching into the phone, serenading strangers with “Mary Had A Little Lamb” using the 4-5-6 keys, and so on. One friend of mine called 411 to get help with her homework.

Giving someone The Silent Treatment. Kids most often do this to people they hate, but sometimes a kid will decide out of nowhere that another kid should get The Silent Treatment, and everyone else pitches in and freezes out the innocent party. File under C for “children can be so cruel.”

(Girls Only)

Dressing up in your mother’s cast-off clothes and costume jewelry. If your mom made the mistake of not hiding her make-up carefully enough, you could parade around the house looking like a very small and unfashionable drag queen.

(Boys Only)

Opening your mouth to show others the partially-chewed contents.

K-6 STATUS SYMBOLS

Lunchbox. Your lunchbox should have a cool cartoon or TV character on it. Try to talk your mother out of the brown-bag idea – at least until sixth grade, when lunchboxes become “babyish” and everyone but everyone brings their lunch in a brown bag.

Bookbag.

Birthday parties. Other kids will judge you – harshly – on the quality of the cake, the amount and nature of the party favors, and the entertainment. Never, ever, ever get a clown. Never, ever, ever let your mom serve fruit. Slumber parties, yes; pony rides, no. If you can talk your parents into renting an entire venue for your birthday – like a roller rink or a pool – do it, but if Mom and Dad don’t go for that, you can “settle for” pizza and ice-cream cake and horror movies. Remember: if another kid pukes at your birthday party, you have done well.

How much TV your parents let you watch. Staying up on the latest sitcoms will do wonders for a kid’s popularity. (Take it from a kid who could only watch PBS and nature shows.)

How late you get to stay up.

Who you sit with at lunch. Do not sit at a table where kids read books. Even if you would really rather read a book, sit at a table where kids throw food.

HOW TO EARN YOURSELF A MEASURE OF FAME AT SCHOOL

Being the first to do, or get, something. If you get braces first, or a bra, or report on the latest ride at Great Adventure that you went on three times last weekend, you will become a minor celebrity.

Throwing up. Kids hate ralphing, and they will deny to themselves that they feel sick until the last possible moment; then they announce, “I think I have to . . .” and hurl everywhere. Distasteful though it sounds, you can get attention by hurling; nobody ever forgets The Barfer. Barfing in class will garner the most favorable attention, since the rest of the class will have to file out into the hall until a member of the janitorial staff shows up with a mop, and while you gag and sniffle your way to the nurse’s office, your schoolmates will thank you for getting them out of the day’s long division lesson. Barfing at lunch also works (your mates get a longer recess period), but in a pinch, you can also barf on the bus (your mates get a late pass). Try to reserve barfing on field trips for real emergencies. Don’t barf on anyone else.

Getting a bloody nose or breaking a bone. The barfing principle applies here also; nobody ever forgets the kid whose top teeth went through her upper lip when she fell off the swing-set. Having an audience helps, especially for less glamorous injuries like bloody noses.

Wetting yourself. You don’t want to do this, but if you think barfing or losing a finger will bring you fame, just wait until you “can’t hold it anymore.” (Note: you might as well change schools.)

Talking back. If I had known how little my “discipline marks” mattered in fifth grade, I would have let the lip fly. Other kids love it; they will tell kids who didn’t witness it how “stupid” you acted, but they will secretly admire your stones.

Your parents get a divorce. In possibly the only benefit of a home breaking up, other kids will handle a child of divorce with care for months.

Showing prodigal ability at a non-school subject.

THINGS TO AVOID DOING IF YOU WANT TO HAVE FRIENDS

Tattling. The first, last, and only reason that kids get away with doing such mean stuff to one another. Made men will rat each other out faster than eight-year-olds will, and kids take full advantage of this Cosa Nostra protection. Younger siblings generally do the most “telling,” but among peers, it just doesn’t happen, because it leads to ostracism. (But when one kid breaks down and tells, the others all breathe a sigh of relief – the evil-doer got told on, and they didn’t have to do the telling.) If you’ve done something tattle-worthy, and another kid makes noises about turning you in, sneering “tattletale” at her retreating back usually stops her in her tracks. If she tells anyway
– well, see “The Silent Treatment.”

Acting like a know-it-all or a show-off, or thinking you’re so great.

Going out of turn.

Hogging. Kids like everything to be divided evenly, and as a result, parents spend a lot of time chalking lines down the middle of the back seat and weighing pieces of cake with a scale. Kids also like to accuse each other of taking more than their fair share, or, to use the vernacular, “Quit hogging it!” I don’t know why adults don’t use this expression more often, but when they do, it tends to have the desired effect. For example, if I politely ask the Biscuit to share the covers, I get no response, but an elbow jab and an angry “quit hogging the blanket!” get the job done nicely.

Bragging. See “thinking you’re so great.”

Wearing clothing that a relative made.

Having strict parents. This problem only gets worse as the stuff you want to do gets more exciting and dangerous; if you didn’t loosen them up before junior high school, you might not see a single beer until you went to college. Oldest siblings had the worst of this phenomenon, because their parents hadn’t gotten tired of enforcing the rules yet.

Getting picked on. Other kids don’t care that you get picked on, per se; bullies form a natural part of the childhood landscape, and they don’t necessarily think less of you if you get pounded or stuffed in a locker. But they don’t want to let themselves in for the same treatment, either, so they tend not to associate with kids that have a recurring bully problem.

Perhaps not everyone had the same experiences that I did, but when I talk to people about grade school, I find that most of them remember these things, and that most of them remember themselves as a lot like me – harried, confused, trying to get through the school day without violating an unspoken code. Some of the rules I recall bring Lord Of The Flies to mind, but some of them seem like they would fit just fine into adult life – don’t take someone else’s turn, don’t brag about your allowance, and don’t puke in public if nobody else derives any benefit.

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