Wow. I didn't expect this much response! Or this many varieties...

There's a lot of these 'choosing it' rhymes on other pages - such as here . Actually, a lot of those were posted by me :S We had several...

As for the 'time out', we crossed our fingers and yelled "S.P!", my mum said "pax" as a child, and the teachers tried to make us make a T with our hands and say "Time Out" when we were in P.E. (gym). And it was ALWAYS called "tig-and-tag", but when we called out "tig", almost never saying "tag", but it was always "tag, you're it" if we did the full version. I wonder why that was?

I'm surprised "Stick-in-the-mud" wasn't mentioned, but maybe that was just a local thing...our gym teachers knew it, and my brownie/rainbow/guide leaders all knew it, and we often played it in the playground. Very much like "tig and tag" (or whatever everyone else called it), but when you "tigged" someone, they had to freeze with their feet apart and their arms spread wide (not freeze in the position they were caught). The teachers/leaders made us go under the legs of the frozen people to save them; we played it ourselves as going under the arm (far quicker, and far far better when there were people of different sizes [tall/large person squeezing under short/small person=embarressing], and genders, and with skirts). The trick was to "tig" all of the people before they could unstick the others. There were usually several "It"s. You had to say "Stick-in-the-mud" rather than "tig".

((Does anyone have any old books that might shed some light on which came first - tig or tick(y)? The two words must be related somehow.))

-Viracocha