apropos to the good bad US accent debate.

I’ve noticed that one of the biggest differences is that actual words and how they are used. You can have a perfect British accent and still sound like an American doing a bad impression because the word usage is wrong and vice vera. The hardest thing for me posting here is to take the words I know how to use and rearrange them, srunch some up, stretch other bits out and generally throw the whole bunch up into the air and hope that by the time they land they’ll have magically reordered themselves from English to American so that folks can understand what I’m getting at.

While simultaneously editing out the traditional Scots swearing that would normally make my speech interesting and colourful :-P IJS

The paranoia definitely exists here, at least out in suburbia. You don't see kids playing baseball anymore unless they're wearing uniforms. I have had arguments about it with the wife of one of my best friends. She is adamant about not letting her kids out unsupervised.

I long for those carefree Enid Blyton days when parents would send their kids out to play and not let them back in til supper. *sigh* aaah the golden era, we had grass back then. t remembers green things

Did other people play Elastics?

Ooh yes. and skipping with long ropes, tag, queeny queeny,

Another game was "branch jumping". One friend had this huge pine tree in his backyard. At the top was wood platform and from there we'd launch ourselves in a race to see who could get to the bottom first. We were eventually stopped from playing that when Chris -- who's backyard had the tree -- fell 15 feet and broke his arm.

Branch jumping sounds fun. We had a rope swing over a quarry pit that had been all grown over withe trees and stuff. I stopped playing there when I fell must have been about 15 feet aswell and landed on my back. I was lucky, Steven, my ½ brother fell of a while later and took a huge gash out of his side. The adults took the swing down after that.

A few of my friends and I used to pretend we had a TV network, and we'd make up shows for it, with each show based in someone else's back yard. One friend had a swingset with a rope and a rope ladder and one of those things you walk across with your hands, so in her yard we had a Jungle Explorers show, where we'd pretend to be going through a jungle somewhere and telling people about the different animals. Then we'd usually get attacked by something and get killed, with spectacularly over-dramatic death scenes.

In another friend's yard, we'd have a news show, with one person as the reporter, and the rest of us acting out a war in the background. Sometimes someone would play Saddam Hussein and the rest of us would attack her. The trick was for everyone to pay attention to everyone else, so that the reporter would keep reporting without turning around to look at the rest of us, and she had to keep up with what we were doing, and we had to listen to what she was saying, so that she had to report everything that we were doing, and we had to do everything that she said we did.

Hil R that sounds like an ideal game for comedy improv.

I've heard a lot of stuff about how damaging playing tag is

What on earth is wrong with tag?

Of course, dodgeball was actually one of my favorite games. Unlike kickball, you didn't have students picking teams, which to me was the most humiliating part of PE. And, I was better at it than most sports--I had no hand-eye coordination to speak of, but I was quick and agile.

There were no other kids in walking distance of my house when I was a kid, so I played by myself a lot. My bike was a racehorse, and I laid out courses around the yard to represent the Triple Crown races. My swingset was a spaceship. Extra beanpoles from the garden served as teepee frames, or when broken in half, swords or lightsabers. The woods behind our house served as various imaginary lands, though since my mom is a champion worrier, I could only play there during that fraction of the year that was neither hunting season nor warm enough for rattlesnakes.

You can have a perfect British accent and still sound like an American doing a bad impression because the word usage is wrong and vice versa.

Quite true. Word choice and word order are also good ways of getting down dialect on a page, such that it's not all conveyed with odd spellings and apostrophes and dropped letters. Of course, I still don't know what about drains is so laughable, but I'm willing to let that one go.

I long for those carefree Enid Blyton days when parents would send their kids out to play and not let them back in til supper.

If you'll recall, the kids in Enid Blyton books had this habit of being kidnapped and/or stumbling onto buried treasure someone else would kill to obtain. Twasn't the Ship of A Nice Quiet Day, you know!

We never found any buried treasure... and we looked.

The hardest thing for me posting here is to take the words I know how to use and rearrange them, srunch some up, stretch other bits out and generally throw the whole bunch up into the air and hope that by the time they land they’ll have magically reordered themselves from English to American so that folks can understand what I’m getting at.

Believe it or not, USians are more than capable of understanding UK English. We don't need it translated.

Hil R that sounds like an ideal game for comedy improv.

Probably. Our parents were pretty disturbed when they noticed that we'd gone from playing house and princesses at age 5 to every make-believe game ending in death at age 10.

What on earth is wrong with tag?

It's too elitist. The fastest kids always win. (But really, the only time we played tag by the real rules was when the adults made us do it. Otherwise, we'd change the rules around so that it would be more fun.)

Did anyone else play TV tag? That was where, if the person who was it was about to tag you, you could avoid it by sitting down and shouting out the name of a TV show. Each show could only be used once, though, so if you reused one, you were it. We had to change it to TV/book tag or TV/movie tag sometimes, though, because one family didn't have a TV. (Their parents thought it was bad for the kids' imaginations or something. They eventually got one, with a satelite dish and everything, when the youngest kid was about 15.)

We never found any buried treasure... and we looked.

We did. Granted, this treasure was a rusty suitcase, an empty beer bottle, a plastic harmonica, and a 1923 penny, but it was our treasure. (The suitcase was important because we'd never seen a metal suitcase like that before. The beer bottle was important because it was the only non-broken one we'd ever found in the woods. The harmonica was important because we could use it to make someone's little sister be the court musician for our kingdom. The penny was important because it was really old and the design on the back wasn't the Lincoln Memorial or the wheat design, but something else that we'd never seen before.)

So, the properties that make things important to 9-year-olds: uniqueness, or the ability to be used to torment a younger child.

I loved TV tag.

And I'm surprised that fastest kids always winning is the issue with tag. I expected it to be more like unpopular kids getting ganged up on, or something. Anyway, I still think it's dumb. IMO, as long as you play a variety of games that use different skills over the course of any given week or month, it's a non-issue.

I loved PE in elementary school, except when we had to play soccer, which bored me. (It still does--sorry, un-Americans.) I hated it in middle school, mostly because rapid growth spurts were making me so clumsy.