No one knew who was the bigger prankster - the boys or the marbles! From time to time, the box jumped out of the school bag and came crashing to the floor! The box of marbles came handy when the class got too monotonous. When you dug your hands into a boxful of marbles, its tinkling sound lit up a smile! Hawkers set up shop outside the school gate and enticed students with an attractive marble display. These were stone-like in a grey monotone. When viewed against the sun, a kaleidoscope of colours filled its interior! Like a crystal ball, the more you gazed, more secrets it revealed! A second variety of marbles was the opposite. A marble was a collector’s delight, exquisitely crafted, shiny and glassy. Regardless of your proficiency in the game, you maintained a marble collection. The rest of us were not so dexterous and stumbled to strike a target even a few inches away! The champion marble player could strike a tiny marble into the far distance with unerring accuracy. Like billiards and carom, it took a combination of concentration and finger-skill to master it. Somewhere, in the past few decades, we lost this game.Ī game of marbles sharpened a variety of basic skills. All you needed was a blue sky, a patch of green and a pocketful of marbles. What set marbles apart from other games was its simplicity. Back then, it was the first game you grew up with. We’d better quit, while we still have a few marbles left.We see children playing many games these days, but there is one notable absence - the game of marbles. Wodehouse, here’s a citation from his novel Cocktail Time (1958): “Do men who have got all their marbles go swimming in lakes with their clothes on?” and the smoke-holder like a man who is shy some of his marbles.”Īnd since we never pass up a chance to quote P. The OED’s first citation for the usage is from George Vere Hobart’s novel It’s Up to You (1902): “I see-sawed back and forth between Clara J. This sense of “marbles” originated in North America in the early 20th century, the OED says, noting that it usually appears in the phrases “to lose one’s marbles, to have (also not have) all one’s marbles, and variants.” On to “marbles,” which the Oxford English Dictionary says is used colloquially to mean “mental faculties brains common sense.” The usage seems logical to us, since “gone fishing” is widely used as a whimsical way of saying “absent,” “temporarily closed,” or “on vacation.” If “gone fishing” can mean physically absent, why not mentally absent as well? We’ve been unable to document this usage in any standard slang reference books, but it’s alive and well on several Internet sites and in discussion groups. “Toys in the Attic” was the title track on an album released by Aerosmith in 1975, and it’s about lunacy all right.Ī less loony phrase, “gone fishing,” is sometimes used to mean out of it or not quite all there. Green’s says that “to have toys in the attic” means “to be eccentric, to be insane, to be simple, childlike.” The dictionary’s first citation is from John Sayles’s novel Union Dues (1977): “Another one with toys in the attic.”īut the expression is at least a couple of years older than that. (Seems appropriate, no?) Green’s Dictionary of Slang records this whimsical couplet from 1803: “Cram not your attics / With dry mathematics.” Since the early 19th century, “attic” has been used as a slang word for the head. Let’s look at these loony expressions one at a time, starting with “toys in the attic.” The song was written by Roger Waters and Bob Ezrin for the 1979 album (and rock opera) The Wall. If people say you have “toys in the attic,” you’ve “gone fishing,” or you’ve “lost your marbles,” they mean you’re bonkers. They must have taken my marbles away.” Would you care to comment on any of these?Ī: Like “bats in the belfry,” the expressions in that Pink Floyd song, “The Trial,” are references to being crazy. Q: Your discussion of “bats in the belfry” reminded me of the Pink Floyd lyrics “Toys in the attic I am crazy, / Truly gone fishing.
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