Author Archives: Gillian Northrup

Chubby Bunny

Text:

“When you are sitting around a campfire and the smoke starts blowing you, you start saying ‘chubby bunny chubby bunny chubby bunny’ until the smoke moves. Saying ‘chubby bunny’ is supposed to make the smoke go away.”

Context:

QK is a 23-year-old American Recruiter who grew up in Minnesota. She told me this tradition that she did living in Minnesota when she young, and she was sitting by a fire and didn’t want to sit in the path of the smoke. 

Interpretation:

This is something I used to do growing up as well, and I remember sitting around a campfire, in direct smoke saying “chubby bunny” over and over again in hopes that the smoke would go away instead of just moving. I think this tradition is probably specific to places where it gets cold outside and you can’t just go away from the fire or else you will get too cold, so you have to sit by the fire, even if smoke is blowing in your face. It often seemed to work, as if the near rhyme had a magical effect on the smoke that got it to move. It’s a tradition I would even tell younger kids as I got older. I think we have a tendency to try to find ways to control things that are uncontrollable in nature. Even though saying “chubby bunny” can’t actually change the direction of the wind and move the smoke away from us, it is fun to try and when it does move, it seems like magic. 

Four Square (Game)

Text:

“There are four squares [on the ground] and everyone stood in an individual square and one square was the “King” – the person who had done the best so far or got there first in the beginning. You are hitting a ball in a square [from one person to the other], calling different names out of moves or “tricks”. One move was “around the world”, where if the ball hits in your square you have to spin before hitting it out. You moved up in ranks if you did well, and if you didn’t hit it, lost the ball, if you hit it out of your square, or it double bounced [bounced twice] in your square you would be out. One move was called the “penny drop” where you hit the ball really lightly so it would double bounce in someone’s square, and they would be out.”

Context:

MM is a 24-year-old American Missionary from a town in the middle of California. I asked her about any games she remembers playing while growing up and what the rules were for the game. 

Interpretation:

Four Square is a game I played growing up during recess as well, but for me, it looked a bit different than the way my informant described it. While the basic rules remained the same, we had a distinct oikotype of the game that didn’t involve the tricks that my informant mentioned. When I mentioned some of the rules of the way I played it growing up, my informant hadn’t heard of those either. It’s interesting to me that I could’ve gone to any group of children where I am from and the rules would’ve been the same, but now if I tried to play it with people from a different state, we probably wouldn’t be able to agree on how it would be played to the point where a game with a basic concept has completely different rules in different places. Games like these can develop subcultures where children really take them seriously and competitively and they turn into more of a sport than a game. It showcases the inherent competitiveness of kids and their way to make creative fun of their own. 

UCLA Rivalry Week Monument Protection

Text:

“UCLA is rivals with USC, and 1-2 weeks before playing USC in football all the important statues or any kind of monumental thing at UCLA got boarded up so that no one could come and mess with it. This included Bruin Bear and the 42 from Jackie Robinson which would be put in a box. People wrote on the box with chalk or markers and say things like ‘F*** SC’ or ‘Go Home’.” 

Context:

MM is a 24-year-old American Missionary from a town in the middle of California. She attended UCLA for college and I asked her if there were any specific UCLA traditions that she remembered during Rivalry Week (when USC would play UCLA in football).

Interpretation:

As someone who attends USC, I know a little bit about this tradition, except at USC we don’t put our monuments in boxes, instead we cover them with duct tape to protect them from UCLA students. Clearly there must’ve been a history of the schools vandalizing each other’s monuments that caused them to start protecting them during Rivalry Week. The writing of “Go Home” on the box tells me that they are expecting USC students to come to campus to attempt some sort of vandalism or prank. It tells us how important football is at both of these schools and how the rivalry itself has traditions behind it that don’t really match up with football or anything about the school – the traditions have evolved into something separate from the schools themselves and amplify the hatred between the two schools.  which amplifies the hatred between the two schools.

UCLA Gesture “Fours Up”

Text:

“At all of our sports games we would do “fours up.” You would hold up four fingers.”

Context:

MM is a 24-year-old American Missionary from a town in the middle of California. She attended UCLA for college, and I asked her if there were any specific UCLA sports traditions that she remembered. She wasn’t sure what this tradition meant – she said she just walked into it and that originally, she thought it was for fourth down in football but then they did it at basketball games too. She ended up looking it up and telling me it was for the four letters in UCLA. 

Interpretation:

This example of a tradition that you take part in but don’t know what it means is probably pretty common in places like a college. When you get to college, you are thrown in to a bunch of traditions that everyone else seems to know, and you are often on your own to figure them out. When everyone else seems to understand a tradition, it seems silly to ask about it, so it’s better to just pretend. This can show us how important it is in our society to fit in and avoid doing things that could put you in the outgroup. It also shows us how traditions and their meanings could evolve – if my informant told someone else their theory of the meaning behind “fours up” being for fourth downs in football, that meaning could spread as well if other people didn’t know what it meant. And certain traditions can take on different meanings for different people, even if born out of the same context. Even if looking up what “fours up” means would be an easy solution, our tendency is to try to figure it out ourselves because we want to take part in the tradition naturally so we can really feel like a part of the group. 

Sharks and Minnows (Game)

Text:

“Sharks and Minnows – there would be a shark and they would tag people (the minnows) who were running across a defined space and the sharks could touch anyone anywhere that wasn’t in the ‘safe zone’ at the beginning and end of the defined space. Once the shark touches a minnow then they become another shark and the game goes in that manner with people running back and forth across the defined space until everyone has been tagged except one final minnow who becomes the shark in the next round. ‘Run minnows Run’ is the chant that goes along with it.”

Context:

OA is a 21-year-old American student at USC. She grew up in Washington. I asked her about any games she remembers playing while growing up and she told me about “Sharks and Minnows”. 

Interpretation:

This game is similar to one I played growing up called “Ships Across the Ocean”. The rules are pretty much the same, but the chant is different, and the name is different. I assume because of how similar the rules are that this is an example of monogenesis (one origin) and diffusion, instead of polygenesis (multiple origins). It’s likely that this game developed somewhere and spread across the country (and perhaps to other countries as well), but the name got changed as different people played it. It isn’t uncommon for kids to change the rules of games to fit their likings or to fit a certain context the game is being played in. Kids are creative and play games to spend time with each other, and they can get incredibly competitive. A game like this is fun because you had to be fast, but you also had to be agile and play smart when trying to evade the sharks, so it made it so that boys and girls alike could excel in it and different people were winning each time.