[m i a o w] the cat

M and I went to Mung’s for dinner on Saturday night. You read correctly. Out. To. Dinner. Small Z came too. In the course of the evening a few other people there were discussing band names. Last night while we were lying in bed, M said;
“I know a good band name. Say Indians.”

“Indians.”

“No, Say Indians.”

“INDIANS!” I hissed at him. “I’m saying it.”

“No. Two words. Say and Indians. Say Indians.”

“But why would you call a band that? I don’t get it?”

I felt his disbelieving stare through the darkness.

“Didn’t you ever play British Bulldogs at school?”

“No. Girls hardly ever got to play. And anyway, I had an ongoing fear of flying objects near my head because I didn’t know my eyes were crap until I was nineteen.”

He sighed. Quietly. “Well, you know, when someone tried to get you and you were safe from them, you’d say “Indians!”‘

“You would?”

“Yeah, der.”

“That is weird. When I was in primary school and we were playing chasey, or whatever, when we were safe we would say “I’m barley!” and you couldn’t be tagged.”

“Barley?”

“You weren’t ever barley?” I was momentarily incredulous until I recalled we come from different states and that when I was playing chasey, he was probably drinking in a pub somewhere and playing in bands.

“I remember,” I said, “that my dad told me when he was little they used to say FayKnights.”

We both pondered this for a moment, and together wondered at the spelling. Maybe it was someone’s name? Faye Knights? Who knows. Anyway, the conversation ended at this point, as sleep was far more important. But I just looked up “I’m barley” on Google, and found all these spelling challenged people using ‘barley’ instead of ‘barely’. As in, ‘I could barley contain myself’. Gah. So instead I went to somewhere I haven’t been for ages. The ABC Australian WordMap site. And there it was! Barley! I was reminded by one of the entries that we also used to cross our fingers when we did it.

Bizarrely, some people thought it must be spelled ‘Bali’ (which is fair enough, I suppose). I did look for ‘Indians’ but there weren’t any related entries. Weird name for a band too, I reckon. Oh! And look at this - here is mention of FayKnights which some people suggest might be ‘Fey Knights’. I think I’d like to be a linguistics investigator. One day.

BROWSE / IN TIMELINE
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BROWSE / IN Musings
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» Grand Finale

COMMENTS / 4 COMMENTS

Barley!! And yeah, that’s how it was spelled in my head. Not like barley that you put in soup, but like barley sugar.
This is so interesting. I think a linguistics investigator would be a great thing to be. My ex-boss and I would have conversations on things like this all the time.

Rae typed this on Aug 27 08 at 8:18 pm