nyaa nyaa/ naa naa

[Laurence Horn]

And come to think of it, I can't quite recall if we used "All-y all-y in free" as I claimed earlier or "Ollie ollie in free" as I just claimed below.  They wouldn't have been homophonous for us--"Ollie" with an /a/ (really a script a) rhyming with "collie" and otherwise known as the nose-biting dragon companion of Kukla and Fran, vs. "all-y" with an /O/ rhyming with no actual word, although I could imagine saying "Yesterday it felt like a real summer day, but today it's kind of fall-y", rhyming with "all-y".  Oh, I have it:  all-y as in Paulie.

LH

On Feb 14, 2012, at 8:29 PM, Paul Johnston wrote:

> Come to think of it, "ollie ollie in free" was used in Morristown, NJ in the '60s.
>
>
> On Feb 14, 2012, at 8:17 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>> Subject:      Re: nyaa nyaa/ naa naa
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> On Feb 14, 2012, at 8:09 PM, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>>
>>> At 2/14/2012 12:22 PM, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>>>> My personal recollection of text and pronunciation is "ollie ollie in
>>>> free"
>>>
>>> I have asked two friends for their recollections.  The three of us
>>> all recall the phrase and pronunciation as above.
>>>
>>> One, a woman now in her eighties, grew up in Connecticut and the
>>> Worcester, Mass. area.
>>>
>>> The second, male, was a lad in NYC in the mid-940s.
>>
>> Aha!  I'm not alone, then.  (Well, I was a lad in NYC 5-10 years after that.  Give or take a millennium.)
>>
>> LH
>>
>>>
>>> The third, female, grew up in Cambridge, Mass. in the mid-1950s.
>>>
>>> Joel
>>>
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