WHAT DO YOU CALL THAT GAME?

How the playground fosters not only a sense of community, but a local dialect, too

Aside from receiving an education to prepare yourself for the harsh realities of the outside world, the most important part of elementary school was recess – specifically, what happened on the playground, where friendships were forged, lasting impressions were made and friendly games of tetherball turned ugly after a few missed swings and a healthy dose of trash-talk.

Or maybe your playground sport of choice was soccer baseball. What’s that, you say? Soccer baseball? Okay, you might have called it kickball. Or perhaps you know what I’m referring to as foot baseball. Or Quickbase. Or maybe you didn’t name it at all, and just played “that game” where you kicked a soccer ball around a baseball diamond and kept score with baseball rules. It really depends on where you’re from.

According to a survey done last year by The 10 and 3, kickball is the preferred term in both the U.S. and Western Canada. (Although, anecdotal research conducted by the National Post suggests many of our friends in British Columbia will know the game best as California Kickball). East of Saskatchewan, though, it is widely referred to as soccer baseball. Whatever you call the game, though, it’s the perfect example of how something common to the entire country can have an entirely different name from province to province, territory to territory, region to region and, sometimes, city block to city block.

Jonathan Cheng, 26, grew up in North York, near Toronto, where he played a sport called foot hockey – essentially, soccer, but with a tennis ball – during recess. The name of the game was shared by students like we might imagine our early ancestors sharing oral histories around a fire. “It was a term passed down through the grades above us,” Cheng said. “We knew of the game when we started having recess in Grade 1. We would overhear second-graders talking about the game. And when I got to Grade 2, we would pass it down to the first-graders younger than us.”

When Cheng graduated to junior high, he moved two blocks to a feeder school for kids from different parts of Toronto. When he approached his new classmates about playing foot hockey, they had no idea what he was talking about, and looked at him like he was some kind of weirdo. “I noticed others were playing the same game,” Cheng said. “But they called it ‘hocker’ instead. To them, it was a mix of hockey and soccer.”

Cheng’s experience, while certainly amusing in retrospect, is hardly unique. Charles Boberg, an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics at McGill University, has found similar examples of shifting terminology based on region for other playground games. “Across Canada, people call it the teeter-totter,” he explained. “Here, we call it a see-saw. Some kids come here and have no idea what that term means.”

The way that “foot hockey,” as a term, was passed down to Cheng makes sense to Boberg, as well. “We generally learn to speak with the people we speak to as we’re developing our language,” said the professor. “Your friends in school have a huge influence on your speech. If your particular school uses terms and you hear them in the playground, those are going to be your terms, and they can be very durable.”

Regional terms are derived mostly from the largest group of people you first meet, which for many of us, are playground friends. In this sense, recess isn’t just a time in which you learn to socialize, it’s when you develop your language, and by extension, your identity. For children of immigrants whose parents learn English as a second language, interactions at school can be especially informative and influential.

I know this from experience. My family immigrated to Toronto just as I was beginning third grade, and it was on the playground where I was first integrated into an English-speaking environment. There, I learned to play games like soccer baseball for the first time. And of course, those terms remain identifiers to me all these years later. Therein lies the larger point to these regional terms. There’s a badge of honour that persists from sharing a common vernacular and creating a community with it.

We see this clearly in Cheng’s example: “foot hockey” was shared with him via the older kids in the second grade; then, the following year, he passed down the terminology to a new batch of first graders. The sense of community that this passing down institutes is something few things outside of language can create. “One of the ways we identify as part of a group is the language we use,” Boberg said, “You don’t see local dialects disappearing, and the reason is it is still important to people to feel like they belong to a local community.”

Despite what can be described as a flattening of the world in the sense that everyone can communicate with everyone else, regional dialects and playground lingo are likely to persist, according to Boberg. “That’s way too big of a community to feel a part of,” Boberg said of the online world. “We fundamentally want a sense of belonging to a local community with people that we look in the face once in awhile. There needs to be ways to show our membership in that community and language is one of them.”

Whether it’s a divide of countries, provinces, cities, school districts, or – in Cheng’s case – a mere two city blocks, the terms of engagement on the playground will continue to be dictated by local oral tradition. Cheng, for his part, recalled playing soccer baseball as a kid. When I asked him if he ever called it kickball, he said he associated kickball and recess – but not for the reasons we might expect. “The popular kids television show Recess would always call it kickball,” he said. “But I’ve never heard anyone in Toronto call it that.”

GETTY IMAGES / ISTOCKPHOTO