Cat's Cradle Game History

Im one of those people who like to have something to fiddle with in their hands and it was easy to carry a loop of string in my pocket.

Cat's cradle game history. Included are directions for four classic string games. Is a chamber orchestra that takes its name from one of the oldest games in recorded human history - the cats cradle. Cats Cradlegets its name from the childrens game.

As Vonnegut says For maybe a hundred thousand years or more grownups have been waving tangles of string in their childrens faces to form nothing but a bunch of Xs between somebodys hands 165-166. It has also spread to some extent among the Asiatic islands. Using simply one string - alone in pairs or in groups - across times and cultures humans have created figures invented stories and let their imagination soar.

Cup and Saucer The Witchs Broom Cats Cradle and Jacobs Ladder as well as a brief history of string games. The question of who first played cats cradle the childrens game in which two players alternately take from each others fingers an intertwined cord so as always to produce a symmetrical figure is almost as contentious as the origin of its name. Our Cats Cradle and Other String Games uses the Haddon and Rivers terminology for defining the strings on the fingers and features jumbo yarn.

It is probably one of the oldest games. In the American colonies Cats Cradle or Cratch Cradle was one of the earliest and most popular of all known string games. Though it is most commonly seen as a childrens game in contemporary society cats cradle is one of the oldest and most widespread games found in recorded human history.

Cats Cradle String Games by Camilla Gryski 1983. Cup and Saucer The Witchs Broom Cats Cradle and Jacobs Ladder as well as a brief history of string games. It is one of the oldest examples of human play and thus ties in with the idea that the book though grounded in a specific historical moment is principally concerned with the entirety of the human story.

That certainly sounds far-fetched today but it was a commonly held superstition back in the 1600s and 1700s. Variations of the game have been found in cultures across the world including Eastern Asia Africa the Americas and even the Arctic giving the game a significant amount of interest among anthropologists and ethnologists. Back when I was in middle school I went through a phase where I was really into cats cradle.