My father had and Aunt Nancy who was from the mid-west. She married a California man and they ended up in Connecticut. She was very particular that her title sounded like the insect, not that strange local pronunciation the other folks nearby seemed to prefer. Besides, Ant Nancy has a much better rhyme to it.

In my experience, awnt is the pronunciation in most of Britain and also, oddly, in the Maritime provinces of Canada (perhaps not everywhere but certainly in New Brunswick that is how I heard it) but not anywhere else in Canada that I know of.

I think it is not unusual for there to be different pronunciations in Britain and in North America even where the spelling is the same (including, for instance, putting the stress on different syllables as in the word ‘CONtroversy’ vs ‘conTROVersy’).

Ian said:

Wow, we have a lot in common! My dad also had an Aunt Nancy. I agree, sounds good. The game is Punch Buggy in my background too, with a twist: you had to say the color of the Bug you saw, and there was often a “no punchbacks” to preclude retaliation. So “punchbuggyblacknopunchbacks!” without taking a breath is how it would sound.

Okay, so I have an Aunt Nancy and I am with you on the rhyme. I hail from Maryland—in the PA/DE corner (closer to Wilmington and Philadelphia than anywhere in MD really)—and it’s definitely Punch Buggy how you described–punchbuggyred!

We were an equal-opportunity punchbuggy/slugbug family. As long as you got the punch in first, it didn’t matter. We also called out the color.

In regard to Martha’s question about perdiddles and the version for a tail light out–we used to call it “perdunkle.”

Linda said:

On the topic of padiddles, the name of that other game isn’t Slug Bug, it’s Punch Buggy, at least in my car. Now, for a reverse padiddle, I’ve taken to using padassle, but not in front of my mother.

Minnesota is NOT the only place that plays duck, duck, grey duck. I grew up in South Dakota and we played it, too! I grew up in Madison, which, to be honest, isn’t too far from Minnesota, but my friends throughout the state also played grey duck. I went to college of MN and this was a perennial conversation with folks from around the US. We never noticed a MN connection back then so I suspect others will be reporting that they, too, played it outside of MN.

My group of friends (don’t know if it was my neighborhood or the school I went to later on, not the same group of people), revised the game. We played “pink duck, blue duck, black duck, orange duck” etc., so that you really had to be paying attention to notice “grey duck”! I think I may have come up with the idea, but can’t be certain.

I was also familiar with duck, duck, goose, so we may have played both versions in Madison and elsewhere in South Dakota, or it may have been because of my relatives in other states.

When I was a teen in Utah we played both “Perdiddle” and “Slug Bug,” and the tail light version–quite similar to Katie’s–was “Perdunk.”

Katie said:

We were an equal-opportunity punchbuggy/slugbug family. As long as you got the punch in first, it didn’t matter. We also called out the color.

In regard to Martha’s question about perdiddles and the version for a tail light out–we used to call it “perdunkle.”

I was wondering if Martha was an only child? That might explain why she didn’t know about Slug bug or Padiddle: no siblings on car rides, nobody to play them with. I didn’t have a similar-aged sibling, so I didn’t hear about car games like those until I started going on band bus trips in high school.

Grant Barrett said:

Steve, who says doughnuts have to have holes? No dictionary defines them as having to have holes although they all mention that they can have holes.

I know Grant likes to have a print reference, so I wanted to mention an obscure memory from my childhood that has persisted over the years. In the 1933 book

Farmer Boy

by Laura Ingalls Wilder (Of

Little House on the Prairie

fame) the protagonist Almanzo laments the ridiculousness of doughnuts with holes.

He cites the round doughnut with a hole as being a silly fad from “town” that his sisters preferred to his mother’s more traditional doughnut sticks that she twisted in the middle so that they would turn themselves in the hot grease after they were puffed up and brown on one side. I can’t remember if the author refers to this as a sort of “dough knot” or if my second grade mind made that connection, but I’ve often wondered if this is the derivation of the word doughnut. Almonzo assumed the round doughnut fad would fall off as a person had to babysit the pastries in the grease, making the dessert more labor intensive.

Wish I had the book to quote directly, but only ever saw it in my elementary school library…

We had these twisted stick pastries where I was growing up in southern Indiana and called them tiger tails or dunkin’ sticks.

Just as background,

Farmer Boy

takes place on the Wilder Farm in Malone, NY, boyhood home of Almanzo Wilder. Laura Ingalls wrote this (perhaps?) fictionalized biography of her husband’s childhood.

Trena, that reminds me of another suggestion that came to our email box today: Celling out!