Title: Split
General Information About Item:
- Customary Lore, Children Hand Games
- Language: English
- Country of Origin: United States
- Informants: Kaitlyn Kelley and Irene Lam
- Date Collected: May 9, 2019
Informant Data:
Kaitlyn Kelley has lived in Lakeland, Florida for the majority of her life. She had attended Lakeland Christian School from Kindergarten up until the second grade. Then, she was homeschools during fourth and fifth grade, having skipped third grade altogether. Currently, she studies biological chemical and global health at Dartmouth College.
Irene Lam is of Chinese-American descent. She has lived in Brooklyn, New York for the majority of her life. As a young child, she attend P.S.230 Doris L. Cohen Elementary School in Brooklyn. Currently, she studies computer science and Chinese at Dartmouth College.
Rules:
Performers will start out with the first cycle, which is one round of all the motions. When the performers repeat the motions, this will be the start of the second round. Each cycle will get progressively faster than the cycle preceding it. The performer that messes up, in this case the performers uses the wrong moves, is too slow, etc, will lose the game.
Text:
There is no text for this hand-game.
Contextual Data:
The performers learned this game around the time they were in Kindergarten or in elementary school. The games were not necessarily taught in class, but were learned from other friends they would hang out with during recess or spare time. When the performers were little, they would generally play this game with their friends when they were standing in lines or when they were bored and needed something to pass their time. Since this hand game does not have any verbal elements to it, it would not loss its meaning when applied to another group. The group of people that may generally know or learn these hand games would be young American children attending schools in the U.S. It might be harder for homeschooled children to learn these games since they may not necessarily be around many other peers their age. These games may have been used for something musical a long time ago, but now is generally more for passing time and boredom.
Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):
Transcript:
Interviewer: “So what’s the first hand-clapping game that you guys are performing?”
Performer 1: “I think it’s like Spit…Split?”
Interviewer: “Split?”
Performer 2: “The name’s Split. We’re going to call it Split.”
Performer 1: “It’s like numbers.”
Interviewer: “Split, numbers. Okay. Can you explain the rules of the game?”
Performer 1: “If you mess up the hand motions, then you lose.”
Interviewer: “So what are the hand motions?”
[Shows the hand motions to the game.]
Performer 2: “And that’s like a cycle.”
Performer 1: “That’s one and then you count up. The higher up the number, the faster it goes.”
Interviewer: “And then what’s after that?”
Performer 1: “We do 2, so 1, 2…”
[Proceeds to show the hand motions with the other performer.]
Interviewer: “When do you stop?”
Performer 1: “When one of them, one of us messes up.”
Interviewer: “Can you just do a round until whenever you have to stop?”
[Proceeds to attempt a rounds, but messes up and bursts into laughter.]
Performer 2: “One! We start with one!”
Interviewer: “You can restart again.”
Performers: “One more time.”
[Performs the hand-clapping game.]
Collector’s Name:
Jennifer He ’20
Tags/Keywords:
- Customary Folklore
- Children Hand Games
- Split