Ireland : knockadolly
And here class is a perfect demonstration of how quickly ingroups and outgroups can form in a society.
Nicky Nicky Nine Doors or Ding Dong Dash were the only names I heard as a child. Never played since we lived in a rural area and too much distance between houses. My cousins in the city talked of it though.
In Japanese, it’s ピンポンダッシュ which is a transliteration of “ping pong dash.”
Could also just translates to Pin Pon Dash. Pin Pon is Japanese onomatopoeia for the doorbell sound.
I guess, but that would be the transliteration of the Japanese onomatopoeia as “pin pon” afaik doesn’t really mean much in English. I thought with “ping pong,” we at least associate with the sound.
ding dong dash ?
Don’t ask an American from 20-30 years ago…
Am American from that time frame. We called it ding dong ditch, and so did everyone else I ever heard.
I didn’t hear that phrase till I was an adult. My initial reaction was “Oh, that’s a much better phrase”.
I grew up in Kentucky in the 80s and I grew up calling it a racial slur… and there was no shame around my neighborhood in calling it that because that’s just what it was called. I had no idea what the word meant until years later and now looking back on it I’m disgusted at all of the adults in my neighborhood who let us call it that.
Last week I watched O Brother Where Art Thou with my almost 10 year old daughter and at one point in the movie after it had been said a few times my daughter turned an looked at me and asked “What does ‘negro’ mean?”… and with that I feel like I’ve done a good job at stopping institutional racism in my family line.
All I know is that you are supposed to say you are looking for spare knickers if you get caught.
I always heard it referred to as “ding dong ditch” in the 90s. But I’m Canadian and my only exposure to American terminology was sanitized thru TV broadcasting rules. Was there some kind of racist/sexist/homophobic term floating around or something?
Yes. I won’t repeat the whole phrase but it was called “n-word knocking” by some of the older kids on the playground. For reference, I’m an elder millennial.
Do you live in the south?
Nope, Midwest.
What the absolute fuck. I’m in the same age bracket and I’ve never heard that before.
Oh you musta grew up in one of them fancy non-racist areas. Yeah, we definitely had this version even in the upper-midwest, along the rust belt. Elder millenial as well.
Elder millennial in the rust belt checking in. I didn’t hear it called ding ding ditch until the next generation came along. The racial slur was the only way I had heard it, but I was definitely the typical white male that looked like he fit in with the rural good ol boys crowd. Sadly still look the part until one of them accidentally mistakes me for an ally in their racist shit.
I’m in that age bracket too and remember it being referred to as this by some people. I came to the comments to see if it was a common thing or if I was just neighbors with racists…I guess a bunch of people were neighbors with racists.
Also in that bracket, grew up in Kentucky and can confirm, was neighbors with racists that passed it to their kids.
Elder millennial here too. Never lived in the south till I was older. This was the phrase I heard in elementary school.
My aunt used to call it that… I knew, even as a kid, that was not cool.
American here: Doorbell dixie
American here. I can’t repeat what I was told this game was called.
Yeah that’s what my Aunt used to call it. {{shudder}}
Yeah, same for me, at least in the 70s and early 80s. I think later in the 80s, we started calling it “ding dong ditch”
Only American on earth that calls it that /s
Well, knocking on doors is some 19th century tech level stuff, so Charles Dickens is actually really fitting.
I personally don’t know of a single house/apartment around my home that doesn’t have some form of electrical bell.
Is this some British cultural thing not having door bells?I’m not sure I believe you’ve never knocked on a door.
Lots of British doors have a knocker or nothing, yes. But doorbells are common too.
Interesting, quite different from the parts of Germany that I have lived in.
Some houses still have (mostly historic) knockers, but everyone knows they are just ornamental and nobody would think about actually using them (but would look for the bell button instead).I live in the USA, and I used to deliver food. I would always use people’s knockers if their door had them. 9/10 times they were like “what the hell is that sound? Ohhh the knocker! I’ve lived here X years and no one’s ever used that before!” became probably my favorite part of an otherwise boring job 😂
Lol.
I can totally imagine that happening here exactly like that!
No sane person would even consider using the metal thing on the door, except perhaps for master real-life trolls like you clearly are! :-)
In Germany though most accommodation is in flats, right? Even if in smallish blocks rather than high-rises… I wouldn’t expect those to have knockers…
No, it’s not just the flats.
I grew up and lived in many rural area were the towns consisted of tightly packed, often very old town houses (predating the arrival of electricity by decades or centuries).
Basically no multi-apartment buildings at all.
Still every house had an electrical bell. No exception.
That’s the reason I am so flabbergasted to hear this to apparently be different in the UK.
It comes completely unexpected to me, I always considered having at least one doorbell at every house’s entrance to be a given. Like having windows or a drainpipe. Standard feature.
UK has the oldest housing stock in Europe apparently
The house my parents live in is… about 120 years old iirc. There is a doorbell though.
I am from Germany, which also has some ancient building stock.
The town houses in the area in which I grew up typically are between 100 and 200 years old, some even much older.
All had an electric bell retrofitted.
Hence the name of the game consequently was “Klingelmännchen”, which is hard to translate, as English is missing a diminutive word form.
Best translation is something like “little bell man”.
So I am surprised that door-knockers are still a widespread thing in Britain, as someone mentioned in another comment.
Guess it really is some cultural thing.I guess it is down to type of housing. UK built a lot of terraced houses, whereas Europe built apartments. Apartments need a bell system?
Older houses have cast iron knockers and are seen as attractive features, which I guess is the same everywhere.
It must be more than just the apartments.
I was raised in a rural area with only single-family houses and a practically nonexistent apartment percentage, and also typically very old buildings, most predating the availability of electricity by decades or centuries.
Still every house had an electric bell.
Maybe in Germany at some point there was a widespread excitement for the new technology, making it the expected standard early on, while the Brits valued their traditions more?I guess so. I grew up in the country and never had a doorbell on any of our houses. New builds did have bells, and the big posh houses had old mechanical bells. I remember one having internal bells in each room that would ring the kitchen to get staff help.
I regret to inform Gemma that calling it Chappy is also some “Charles Dickens shite”
FYI chap is Scots for knock. So it’s essentially called Knocky. That ain’t very Dickens.
Dictionary proof: https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/chap_v1
Growing up in the NYC suburbs in the '60s/'70s we called it Ring ‘n’ Run.
Thunder and lightning where I grew up in Oz.
Klingelstreich!
Klingelmännchen
That is way closer to this image than I thought english people ever actually got IRL
I prefer being american than talking like this lowk 😭🙏
It’s why there are so many independence day celebrations dotted around the world.
Independence days are the chief export of England
Makes sense, i wouldn’t like to be a br’tish colony either
Most of those aren’t real lol
I swear I heard like a third of these said by Alex in A Clockwork Orange
This couldn’t be written by a brit, dont they call gravy brown sauce and white sauce?
No, brown sauce is brown sauce.
What the hell is brown sauce.
HP sauce. It’s like A1 sauce, but sweeter.
It’s brown…. sauce.
~Duh. Pay attention.~
FORCEY FUN TIME, jesus christ XD
Struggle snuggle
I don’t see cold on the cob, which is my favorite.
I like this one
Huh, never heard that one. My teacher once said “arrêtez donc les conneries avec les sonnettes” so we called it “connettes” but I’m fairly sure that was just a handful of grade 4s, that one year.
Tolkien’s first draft
The Fuckoffship of the Ring
Canadian here. We used both “Knicky knocky nine doors” and “ding dong ditch,” but if I remember correctly, the first was more prevalent, and definitely is the first thing that comes to mind for me personally.
Oh, and I’m a middle millennial.
Also a Canadian (Ontario) millennial, I don’t think I’ve heard “ding ding ditch”, but would’ve called it “nicky nine doors”, no “knocky”, and no “nicky nicky”.
Never really thought about why it was called that 😛
As someone who grew up down south in the UK, it’s “knock down ginger”
I have no idea who ginger is and what they have to do with prank knocking
If you rearrange some of the letters in ginger you get the hate crime version of the name from the US South.
Hmm… That didn’t seem right to me, so I looked it up
The “knock, knock, ginger” is linked to a 1967 Childhood in Poetry book by John Mackay Shaw. Behold these glorious verses:
Ginger, Ginger broke a winder, Hit the winda—crack! The baker came out to give ‘im a clout, And landed on his back.
However, we’ve also seen the game called knock down ginger.
This may actually be more accurate, as “knock down” is a term dating to the late 18th century. It refers to knocking on a door by pulling the door knock striker.
Plus, ginger was a common term then as it meant to “ginger up” (move smartly). So, knock the door, leg it in timely fashion.
https://professionalmoron.com/2022/04/18/history-of-knock-knock-ginger/
That feels a bit more like it to me, though surprised it’s not even a century old, I figured it was Victorian
Yeah a poem about whipping gingers on the back. From 1967.
Uh… Who is going to tell him?
We called it “Knock a Door Ginger”. Like you, never understood the Ginger significance
Likely some casual irish racism in a similar vein to the Southern US calling it n* knocking, although in my town no one ever called it that, it was ding dong ditching
Also from southern UK and we called it knock down ginger. Looked it up and found this:
https://idiomorigins.org/origin/knock-down-ginger
Where ginger is to move “gingerly” i.e. cautiously or carefully. Can’t comment on how valid that is but that website says the term has been in use since the 19th century.
