Travis in Austin, Texas, has a dispute with friends: is the popular sorting game called paper, scissors, rock, as he believes? Or is it rock, paper, scissors? In the United States, the latter is the more common variant, although people have historically named the game in every possible word order. The game itself appears to go back to counting games in Asia such as Japanese jan ken pon. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “What’s the Correct Word Order for Rock, Paper, Scissors?”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi there. This is Travis Bartos calling from Austin, Texas.
Hi, Travis. Welcome to the show.
Hey, Travis.
What’s up?
Hey, so I was calling because growing up, we would always play the classic game of deciding conflicts where you either choose, you know, paper, scissors, or rock.
Yeah.
And I’m calling because growing up, I’ve always called it, well, just that paper, scissors, rock.
And I’ve recently been receiving quite a bit of pushback insisting that it is rock, paper, scissors.
And I will argue constantly against it, that it is paper, scissors, rock.
-huh.
So I was just wondering if y’all could help clarify this and see if I’m just crazy or what’s going on.
Why didn’t you just do a round of the game to figure out who gets it?
Oh, we couldn’t agree on what to call it first.
That’s great.
So you’re talking about the game where you play this game with your hands, where your hand symbolizes rock, a fist symbolizes rock, flat hand symbolizes paper, and two fingers symbolize scissors, and scissors beats paper, and rock beats scissors, right?
And paper beats rock.
Yes, exactly.
Okay.
And so your version is what again?
Paper, scissors, rock.
Paper, scissors, rock.
But the people around you are calling it rock, paper, scissors.
Yeah, yeah. And I strongly believe that ending on the rock just gives it that little oomph while you’re, you know, throwing out either rock, paper, scissors.
Yeah, maybe.
And are you from Austin originally?
I grew up in Houston.
Grew up in Houston. Okay. And everybody else who’s saying rock, paper, scissors is from Austin or someplace else?
Yeah, and in fact, I was just over Thanksgiving talking to my brother, and it came up, and I called it Rock, Paper, Scissors, and he looked at me even and called me a monster.
Oh, that’s hilarious.
Well, you know what?
I have to throw in another wrench here because I grew up in Kentucky, and I would swear to you that it was called Scissors, Paper, Rock.
Dope!
Yeah, and I actually almost came to blows with, well, not really, but I just had an argument with somebody from New York who said, oh, no, no, no, it’s rock, paper, scissors.
And apparently, you know what, you and I are in the minority, both of us.
Oh, no.
Because the far more common version in this country is rock, paper, scissors.
And in fact, there’s a world rock, paper, scissors society that has world championships.
I don’t know how active they are anymore, but yeah.
But they have in the past at a lot of world championships.
However, the majority need not win on this one, Travis, right?
Okay.
Just because everyone does it doesn’t mean you have to.
And I will tell you what I did.
I went through the newspaper archives and looked for all six variations of this name.
Because this is what Grant does.
Yes.
And I will tell you the oldest one that I found, although it’s not the oldest one for sure, it was from 1935.
And it was paper, rock, scissors.
Rock, scissors, paper from 1937.
Scissors, paper, rock from 1941.
Paper, scissors, rock from 1948.
Rock, paper, scissors from 1961.
And scissors, rock, paper from 1964.
Now, that doesn’t mean anything either.
First, it doesn’t necessarily mean right or best.
But I’m just saying all of the variations have been and continue to be used to describe this game.
And that doesn’t even factor in England.
Right.
In England, it’s paper, scissors, stone.
Or sometimes scissors, paper, stone.
Right.
And it might be something different in Australia.
And the other thing is, if we’re really going to talk about first and best and right, let’s go all the way over to East Asia.
Let’s do the Japanese and call it Jankenpon.
So everyone’s wrong and everyone’s right, and there’s no good answer for this.
Continue to fight.
Make sure the winner gets barbecue.
I don’t know what to tell you.
All right. Well, thank you all very much for adding a little bit more confusion into it.
Yeah, that’s our job.
That’s our job.
No, but really, like if people get all worked up about this, and I hope it’s all good natured, just they need to relax a little bit.
Variation exists.
Variation is interesting.
Families say things amongst themselves that belong to those families, and don’t let the outside world tell you that it shouldn’t be paper, scissors, rock, which is what you prefer.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Well, thank you all very much.
Go forth and prosper, Travis.
I will.
Take care.
Bye.
Thank you.
