Hey Rube! and other archaic knowledge

[Bullgrit]

Way back in my earliest days of D&D (age 13-14), I was not especially well read or worldly -- I was an average teenager of 1980.

In reading D&D books back in the day, especially those written by E. Gary Gygax, I often came across a reference to some archaic bit of knowledge/information that I had no way of knowing. We didn't have the Internet or Wikipedia to easily look up such things, so many times the reference just got missed or given an odd look and skipped.

Usually this wasn't a serious problem, but sometimes not knowing or understanding the reference meant I either just didn't get the meaning of the text or even completely misunderstood it.

For instance:

In the module Keep on the Borderlands, there's the rumor for the PCs about "Bree-Yark!" The text explained that it's like the circus call of "Hey Rube!"

I had never heard of "Hey Rube!" I had no idea what this meant. I took the reference to mean that "Bree Yark" was pronounced as "hay ruub" -- and this made no sense to me.

Eventually, through talking with other D&D players, I figured out what Bree Yark really meant, but it was about 30 years after first reading that text that I ever saw any other reference to "Hey Rube!" My oldest son was watching a Scooby Doo episode where the gang is at a circus, and the ring master called out, "Hey Rube!" when a scheme was going down. I remember saying out loud (to my son's confusion), "So that's how it works."

In the module Secret of the Slavers Stockade, the text mentions there's a "dog-eared deck of cards" on a table. I had never heard of anything "dog-eared," and since the cards belonged to a bunch of terrible and nasty humanoids, I assumed the cards were actually made of dogs' ears. Fortunately, I didn't go 30 years before learning what this meant.

Now, I did learn a lot of new words from D&D books (especially EGG's work), and I started reading more due to D&D. But thinking back, it is kind of curious how the early material (especially EGG's) seemed to be written for older, better read, and more worldly-knowledgeable readers. It's like EGG didn't even consider that 10-14 year old kids would be reading the material (even the Basic D&D material), and wouldn't get much of the archaic references. (Thank goodness for some of the glossaries.)

Now adays, from what I've seen in the current (since 2000) books, things like "Hey Rube" and "dog-eared" would be edited to something like "Alarm" and "well-worn."

Is this good or bad, in your opinion?

Bullgrit

 

[fuzzlewump]

It's an interesting question, but I think the draw of some archaic words might strictly be in nostalgia. If you posed the same question, but instead said it wasn't written by EGG but instead by some writer last month, I think the answer would be clearly that those words would be for the most part not understood, and should be edited and changed.

I'm all for flavorful words, like in Magic the Gathering, I prefer "Sacrifice" to "Discard" and "Battlefield" to "Table," but 30 year old colloquialisms are a different story.

 

[Henry]

I guess I'm thankful to Gary for his esoteric style (another word for which I have him as my source) and I'm also thankful to this huge, 1000+ page Reader's DIgest Dictionary that my mom bought for me when I was a kid; I looked up a HECK of a lot of stuff in that dictionary when I was reading those old AD&D books. Back then, that was our version of 10-year-olds learning how to code (we were doing that too on our Commodore-64's.)

I do wish they put a little more of that in D&D books nowadays, even though it's against conventional wisdom to do so.

 

[Celebrim]

The best things about the first edition books is that they read like arcane and esoteric tomes.

This enhanced rather than detracted from their value and the attaction that they had for us young explorers.

 

[pawsplay]

I remember wondering why a name that sounds like a woman's undergarment would be chosen for a magical item that summons an efreet, not realizing that 1) it's pronounced BRAY-zhur, and 2) in Yankee territory, it is still commonly used to refer to an open fired grill. To me, "brazier" was just the weirdest imaginable word to use for a charcoal burner.

I was a teenager in high school before I "got" pearl of wisdom.

I used to wonder why bugbears lacked any insectile traits.

Bastard sword... sounded naughty. The concept of mixing highborn blood with low did not really sink in until high school as well.

Tarantella. I now recognize this as genius-inspired wordplay. At the time I thought it was really lame to misspell tarantula to name a giant spider monster.

"Ochre" means earthy yellow. It's pronounced O-kur.

Hippogriffs are not the product of the same logic that got us the owlbear, but rather, a mythological griffin variant in their own right.

Rapine is usually pronounced RAPE-ine, not ra-PEEN. It comes from the same root word as "rob." Your mother still doesn't like the way it sounds.

Quisling just sounds like the perfect name for a small, diabolic creature. It actually means "traitor" and comes from the surname of a Nazi collaborator, making it not archaic but recent and politically sensitive.

Lemures are not primates. That would be lemurs. They are Roman spirits, and handily, also sound like Lemuria, an accursed land in the vicnity of Atlantis.

Footpad is a real word that refers to a robber on foot, not some weird metaphorical reference to a cat.

 

[Flatus Maximus]

I do wish they put a little more of that in D&D books nowadays, even though it's against conventional wisdom to do so.

<derail>This is what I find sad. As a teacher, I often wonder, "What's so wrong with challenging folks?" That they might have to actually look something up or, gods forbid, learn something new?</derail>

 

[Andor]

It's like EGG didn't even consider that 10-14 year old kids would be reading the material (even the Basic D&D material), and wouldn't get much of the archaic references. (Thank goodness for some of the glossaries.)

He didn't. It was meant for old wargamers like him. And if he did consider it, he would have (rightly) thought that they could just look it up in a dictionary. Thats www.dictionary.com for you kids in the audience.

 

[Celebrim]

<derail>This is what I find sad. As a teacher, I often wonder, "What's so wrong with challenging folks?" That they might have to actually look something up or, gods forbid, learn something new?</derail>

Yes.

There is no hope for culture until engineers, scientists, and inventors are again considered sexy. I'll think we've turned an important corner when you can stop a school boy on the street and ask him to name is favorite scientist with as good chance of getting an answer as if you asked his favorite athelete. I'll think we've hope for the future when an educated adult can rattle off 200 or so names of engineers, inventors, and scientists as easily as they can rattle off the names of 200 actors and actresses. That would be change I can believe in.

In the mean time, I plan on subversively corrupting as many youths as I can get my hands on, into the dangerous anti-establishment counterculture I espouse. Old school gaming is but one tool in my arsenal.

Save the cheerleader: save the world.

 

[Henry]

Yes.

There is no hope for culture until engineers, scientists, and inventors are again considered sexy.

Again??? Were they EVER?

I'll think we've turned an important corner when you can stop a school boy on the street and ask him to name is favorite scientist with as good chance of getting an answer as if you asked his favorite athelete.

I can't think of a single time in history where this has EVER been true - even prior to 1950 you'd find kids more likely to know Joe Dimaggio and Jackie Robinson than Albert Einstein or Robert Oppenheimer. In Ancient Rome kids were more likely to know Spartacus than Archimedes.

But I agree that it's more likely to be in the future than the past. Geek Chic has never been more prevalent than today -- one of CBS Network's top shows is Big Bang Theory, after all.

 

[Greg V]

I agree with the OP. I absolutely love this aspect of the game, especially in its early history when as an impressionable 6-year-old I picked up the purple-box Basic Set. I try to include a little something along those lines in every adventure I write. Unfortunately, as has been mentioned, it mostly gets edited out.