Page 704 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
Johnny-on-the-pony was a game in which one team formed a line, anchored by the playground fence, with each boy locking his arms around the boy in front of him, thereby forming the “pony.” Members of the other team would run, one by one, and jump on the pony until either the entire team was on top, at which time the pony attempted to shake them off or, better, until the pony came crashing to the sidewalk.
Jotto was perhaps the most lucrative descendant of Scrabble and other word games. The rules of Jotto were simple. If you knew the rules, which most everyone did, then only two pads and two pencils were required to play, but somehow some genius got the idea of packaging the rules with pencils and fancy preprinted pads and selling the combination for a large profit. In Jotto, each of two players would choose a secret five-let- ter word, and the players would then alternate posing five-letter words as guesses. If your opponent named a word that contained any letters in common with your secret word, then you would be obliged to state how many letters the named word shared with the secret word. After a while, you could tailor your guesses to converge on the right answer. One day, I concluded that yacht would be a pretty good secret word, so, not wish- ing to play favorites, I took each of my parents aside and suggested that they use it when they would play against the other. They played that night, and both of them apparently led off with yacht. After I went up to bed, I heard a fair amount of sudden noise coming from downstairs, which, at least initially, I didn’t exactly register as sounds of laughter. I don’t recall that either of them thanked me the next morning for making their lives more pleasurable. And neither of them would thereafter take the suggestion that xylem was a real winner.
red rover Come over is played between two lines of players, usu- ally around twenty-five feet apart. The game starts when the first team calls a player out, using a line such as “Red rover, red rover, send [name of player on opposite team] over” or similar words. The immediate goal for the person called is to run to the other line and break that team’s chain (formed by the linking of hands). If the person called fails to break
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