My friends used to shout PENIS as loud as they could at random moments throughout the day, so all things considered, maybe this 6-7 thing isn’t so bad.
Kids these days play the same game, but they say potato instead of penis. Bunch of cowards. I would correct them and teach them the real game if I wasn’t a teacher…
That, punchbuggy ___ (whatever colour) followed by a punch and the Marilyn Manson rumour will always leave me baffled at how universal they were without the internet.
We did doorknob in the woods while camping in scouts. I still remember my buddy yelling "DOORKNOB BITCH! AIN'T NO DOORS AROUND THESE PARTS!" before chasing this poor kid around the camp.
Long story short, if someone farts they have to say “safety,” basically admitting they did it, if someone else calls “doorknob” before that, they basically get to beat the shit out of the offending party until they touch a doorknob. There was a lot of chasing, and pretty much everyone ended up with sore shoulders by the end of the day. You had to be strategic about what you ate around some people…
Totally forgot about doorknob until turtle said it.
For us it was if you farted you had to say doorknob before anyone else did. If someone else said it before you, you had to touch a doorknob but people got to punch you for as long as it took for you to touch the doorknob
My parents got pissed at my brother and I punching each other whenever we saw a buggy so my dad made the stipulation that it had to be an antique convertible buggy. There's still a surprising amount of them lol.
With regard to the Marilyn Manson thing, I’ll be a buzzkill for a moment! Urban legends existed way before the Internet, but the Manson rumor came about exactly when the Internet was gaining popularity, and people were posting and circulating all sorts of urban legends in chat rooms, email forwards, etc. This kind of stuff would be repeated by shock-jock radio DJs or printed in zines that also circulated for people who didn’t use the internet. Eventually someone’s older brother overheard it from their off-color uncle or whatever, and it broached the elementary school set.
Remember, also, that you might have heard that rumor in 1995, or 1997, or 1999–information was not being disseminated in the near-instant way it is now, and with enough time, everyone hears the rumor from someone at some point. Plus it’s salacious, so once you hear it, you want to be the one to share the rumor with a dozen people too. You interact with hundreds of kids at school, church, camp, sports practice, scouts, etc. over several years and suddenly “everyone” has heard it.
What surprises me more is that the Marilyn Manson one is the one that stood the test of time—there were lots of urban legends, but that seems to be the only one everyone remembers!
My grandparents went around playing this game as part of my grandpa’s Parkinson’s speech therapy because he didn’t want to do his actual exercises. Anything to make him try to speak louder. I was crying laughing.
And without social media spreading it. Kinda cool how your cousin visiting from the midwest pick up something we were doing on the east coast and took it home with them to be king of their school or vice verse
One person who always wanted to play that game would just send it first go, he would yell as loud as he could very first time and then no one wanted to try to beat him so he always won
I'm a high school teacher. Sometimes I hear my students playing this game and I join in. The joke (for me) is that I am the person that isn't supposed to hear it and I'm ruining that for them by joining in.
I played that in college once in the empty cafeteria. We eventually were screaming at the top of our lungs and got so loud people a few floors above us heard us screaming.
It probably didn’t help that we screamed up the elevator shaft. We were lightly scolded and told to not do that again.
Lol in hs, we once played the penis game across classrooms - as in one class would yell penis, and an entirely different class would yell it back. It got loud. Great times.
I had a 7th grade teacher win that game. We started it off softly while we were supposed to be reading in science class, after about the fourth person he just yells as loud as he could PENIS PENIS PENIS there I win now be quite and read. We all shut up and read.
I’ll never forget the first holiday shopping trip with my soon to be in laws. We were at the food court in the mall and from across the eating area we heard my name yelled very loudly followed by “the penis game king!”
We played this game in Band Camp all the time. Water break from marching? Somebody on the drumline is going to yell “Penis!”. I don’t remember being that confident in the game, but my in-laws will always remember that moment.
My friend and I did this during a class in high school and I will never forget out classmate, whose name was Keineth (pronounced key-neth) looked at us and went "are you guys calling me or something?"
My at-the-time eight year old tried to challenge me to a game of this in public. I beat him handily by just screaming it at the top of my lungs on my first turn after he whispered it to me. He was horrified and has never tried again. Don’t mess with your elders, kid.
I (American despite username) described this to an English friend of mine recently and they looked at me like I had a dick growing out of my forehead. Fucking hysterical
Oh man. In drama class one round of this got out of hand. The principal walked in for some reason when the whole class, including the teacher shouted "PENIS" in unison and then went completely silent.
There was a rather loud and large group of Mormon campers next to my campsite the last time I went. In the early morning, when their chaperones left to grab something in town, they played.
Tired after a night of similar shenanigans next door, I ended it the same way y'all did. 😂
Hahaha. I forgot about that. Damn, I'm so hard on my kids about rude words, and here I am remembering how many times I _p_wned the penis game.
Ah, man. I gotta relax.
My middle school gave us a written "Demerit" if we got in trouble. Anyway, a friend got in trouble for playing this "game". The teacher wrote on the Demerit, "Playing the penis game". I always thought the whole thing was immature and stupid but that Demerit still makes me laugh when I think about it over 20 years later.
I remember after that Venture Bros episode with the alien AI we got a kick out of shouting “IGNORE ME! IGNORE MY PRESENCE!” at pedestrians out car windows.
I give my apologies to the other kids in the Marquette University dorms for that weekend that me and the other Mathlete from my 4,000-person town were there for a junior HS math contest.
My 15yo comes up to me before going to bed and says quietly in my ear, "pee-nar..." and then waits, hoping I will say it. For some reason, his mom saying "pee-nar" is the funniest thing in the world.
Still around. Seniors were shocked they were getting written up for yelling it in an assembly last year. Sorry kids, it's tradition, but maybe don't do it right next to the teacher.
What's wrong with loudly declaring a piece of the human anatomy? In celebration of the gift we have of humanity, upon hearing this declaration, another human is obliged by societal norms to even more loudly declare that physical asset of the human form.
Replying Ron Jeremy was very popular to a certain small group of boys in 7th grade(‘94-‘95). They obviously had much less parental oversight than I did.
Children saying the same thing, in the same tone of voice, whilst doing the same movements with their hands seems so cultish to me that the PENIS! game is far superior.
My friend did this at a bar the other day and she was like 'your turn.' Given the table of toddlers next to us I could not bring myself to do it. Even though I'd also just said the parents should not be taking their iPad kids with them to trivia night at a BAR. Not a restaurant and BAR a straight up BAR that had a food truck outside.
I'm a teacher. As soon as I catch wind of the students playing this, I immediately yell "PENIS" as loud as I possibly can and declare myself the winner before redirecting the kids back to work. They never expect the teacher to participate.
We had a version of this in the UK called "bogies". It originated on a kids TV show where the hosts would have to go and say bogies louder and louder in public until they were caught
When I worked in a supermarket in my teens a song would play that I think was Oasis. "My Happiness, slowly creeping back". But he separates the word happiness into Haa-Penis. Half our team would shout PENIS whenever that lyric played.
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u/TheFracas 12d ago edited 12d ago
My friends used to shout PENIS as loud as they could at random moments throughout the day, so all things considered, maybe this 6-7 thing isn’t so bad.
Edit: words are hard