peeties and more dice slang

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Fri, 15 Jul 2005 16:03:16 -0500, Mullins, Bill
<Bill.Mullins at US.ARMY.MIL> wrote:

>"SH-! NOT A WORD NOW, BUT BOYS'LL BE BOYS" Tennessee | Kingsport | The
>Kingsport Times | 1920-03-26 p. 10 col 6.
>
>"Ada, whose residence is to be Decatur, Ga., is popular, as is also a
>lass yclept Phoebe. The Richards, Senior and Junior, have become so
>familiar to the boys that they call them Big Dick and Little Dick, and
>there's strange talk about sixty days on the rock pile, snake eyes,
>throwing your arm off, box cars, slow death, and so forth."
>
>[Oddly enough, this article isn't about dice or craps, but about a
>school which banned kids from shooting marbles "for keeps".  [...]

The next paragraph is also worth quoting:

-----
Occasionally, the dope is, the game, or that is what it is said to be, is
punctuated by the transfer of a marble, which apparently is the gift of
one player to another. No one has officially named the game, but one man,
a former soldier spent a year at Bordeaux, said it was a great favorite
with colored troops there and was known as "African golf."
-----

There's "African golf" again. Clearly there was some cross-pollination
between marble slang and dice slang.


--Ben Zimmer