strip "pididdle," anyone?

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:20 AM -0600 3/6/02, Natalie Maynor wrote:
>In Mississippi in the '50s, we in Jackson said "cockeye" instead of
>"pididdle," but friends I visited in Wiggins, Mississippi, indeed said
>"pididdle."  I well remember when one of those Wiggins friends was visiting
>me in Jackson and surprised her blind date by suddenly slugging him,
>uttering "pididdle."  He hadn't noticed the car.  If she'd said "cockeye,"
>he would of course have known what was happening.
>
>The rules of the game we played were rather sexist:  If the girl saw the
>car (with one burned-out headlight) first, she said "cockeye" and slapped
>the boy; if the boy saw it first, he said "cockeye" and kissed the girl.
>The rules of the game were the same in Wiggins, except for saying
>"pididdle" instead of "cockeye."
>  -- Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu)

Hey, I think I remember that too, even though I was many miles from
Wiggins.  I'd forgotten the details of that asymmetry, but it's true
that calling the padiddle first (within a cross-sex dyad) was
supposed to give you the right to either a kiss or a slap, depending
on the configuration of your sex chromosomes.  Seems unfair, but
there it was.  (Not that I was a ever a kisser or a slappee--we just
knew those as the rules for a game we didn't actually play.  I
probably wasn't in one of those cross-sex dyads too often in the
presence [or absence] of a padiddle, come to think of it.)

larry