One of my students asked me this question and I did not really know how to answer her. She was referring to the kinds of “games” that children and sometimes adults play in order to make a decision, like other forms of flipping a coin, for example.
Here in my country we also do rock paper scissors, but we call it joquempô. We also do odds and evens, par ou ímpar, and a more extended version called dois ou um, “two or one”, in which players present either one or two fingers, and then the ones who chose the same amount of fingers leave the game or become a team. This can also be done with up to five fingers, and then it’s called dedos iguais, “equal/same fingers”.
Are there any other such games in your country? My student really caught me off-guard when she asked that, I had never thought about this cultural aspect.
Also, I’m curious to know what you do and/or did as a child if you’re not from an English-speaking country as well!
Here in the west we don’t have such things as agency to make decisions, because we live under capitalism.
We play these games to try to convince ourselves that we have free will, but we’re just adding a layer of near-randomness in order to pull the wool over our own eyes. What I’m saying is that rock paper scissors is the ultimate form of ideology.
joquempô
That’s wild. In Japanese they say “じゃんけんぽん” when they do rock paper scissors, which is pronounced jankenpon.
Obviously Portuguese had a significant impact on Japanese language and culture with probably the most famous example being tempura. I just wonder which way janken went: from Portuguese to Japanese to vice versa.
Wow, that’s crazy, I didn’t know that! There’s a lot of Japanese immigrants in Brazil, particularly in the region around São Paulo and Paraná, so that might explain the origin of the word. Maybe Portuguese -> Japanese -> Brazilian Portuguese? I’ll have to check that out.
edit: I’m particularly interested in this because I’ve been watching Shogun lol
Wikipedia says it originated in China, became it’s modern iteration in Japan, and then spread to the world.
We do dip dip dogshit, it’s like eeny meeny, but everyone puts their feet in and you ‘dip’ the dogshit in the middle and count around the circle by their feet.
My Chinese friends also taught me heibai pei (match black and white), basically throw your hands in palm up or palm down, majority are left out, then minority continue to compete until two people are left, who do scissor paper rock.
My Chinese friends also taught me heibai pei (match black and white), basically throw your hands in palm up or palm down, majority are left out, then minority continue to compete until two people are left, who do scissor paper rock.
Interesting! That’s pretty much exactly how our dois ou um game goes, but we use one or two fingers instead of palm up or palm down.
Yeah! It is a useful sorting game since like your dois ou um, you can also use it to sort into two groups (though unfortunately it’s binary so can’t sort more like your dedos iguais).
Where I live the sorting games were pretty much choosing one person for a game who was ‘it’, so I can’t think of an English equivalent.
I forgot also to mention drawing the short straw, which we would do with sticks from the ground.
In America we just rev the engines on our gigantic Ford F-350s to see who is the loudest until someone runs out of gas and then we use an app to hire a gas slave to bring us more gas and our hourly burger (required by law)
also the “app” is just a gun
A device made by the cccp on the side of the gun causes it to fire in bursts on ones and zeroes which is interpretted by the city’s “shot spotter” system so they can send the cops to deliver your burger and assault any nearby minorities.
We still use the phrase “draw the short straw” even though we don’t actually pull straws much anymore - one person grabs a number of small objects like matches or peices of straw, and breaks the bottom half off one, then gathers them all in their hand so you can’t tell which one is short. Everyone pulls out straws until the short straw is pulled, and that person has to do the task.
There’s rock-paper-scissors and eeny-meeny-miny-moe
All the ones people mentioned, also children have a game called “Chatterbox” where they will make a paper origami…pyramid that flips open as you manipulate it with your hands. The game usually has several steps where the person will ask a secondary question like "What’s your favourite number, and then flip the pyramid the number of letters in that word, and then ask the person making the question to lift a flap containing the written answer. Really complex devices can have mechanisms that change the conformation of the chatterbox with each answer given and 2 dozen or more possible answers.
We called these cootie catchers
Yeah, we had that here a lot as well. I never knew what they were called, so chatterbox is now a word that I know in English but not in my language lol also, oddly enough, this was very much a girl thing. Growing up, I think I must have seen boys doing this just two or three times, and it was always a really shitty version of the elaborate, pretty chatterboxes that girls did.
I went to a co ed school, and while the girls did put more effort in the boys were also quite into it. One guy made a combination with a paper airplane and kept throwing it at people.
little dudes rock
Nah, growing up in the US, this was also a very “girl” thing
We just called them fortune tellers, because my friends were uncreative I guess.
Not as common but sometimes people do “I’m thinking of a number between 1 and 10” and the person with the closest guess goes first. Usually something a teacher would do with students starting a game.
My spouse’s family are the only people I’ve seen do this and it doesn’t have a name so far as I know, but they will hold out two closed fists and ask you to pick one, having assigned one of two alternatives to each fist without telling which. It’s a way to get a random result when you don’t want to make a decision.
“nose goes” is another one. Basically, when an unpleasant task comes up, and we need to decide who does it, whoever touches the tip of their nose with their pointer finger LAST has to do the task. It’s a good “catch who’s not paying attention” method
Also the secret “reverse nose goes” technique, wherein whoever touches their nose first has to do the task.
We also played odds and evens, but we called it “one two three, shoot” because that’s what we’d say to start each round.
Common: rock paper scissors, coin flip
Teens and college students: nose goes
Children: eenie meenie miney moe, one two three not it
“onetwothree not it!”
Last person to say “not it” does it
