Like Solitaire, it’s one of those game that can be played solo. It usually isn’t, but it can. What it needs, though, is the outdoors and water, preferably in the shape of a gently-flowing stream, or lake, or even a pond. It also needs a collection of flat stones because the stones, once cast, cannot be retrieved or returned.
A lot of us have played stone skipping at some point in our lives. Those of us who haven’t probably will. What its attraction is has never been clearly documented. But judging by the varied names given to the game — English alone has a few: skipping stones, skimming stones, skipping rocks, stone skiffing and ducks & drakes — it’s fair to say the game is popular worldwide.
In many countries and in various languages it is the frog metaphor that is perceived in the hopping stone as it skims the water: in Bengali, it’s called ‘frog jumps’ or ‘kingfisher’; the Bulgarians call it ‘frogs’, too; the Greeks, ‘little frogs’; the Spanish, ‘making frogs’; the Hungarians, ‘making it waddle’, while the Poles refer to the game as ‘letting the ducks out’.
In Mongolian, its two terms translate roughly as ‘making the rabbit leap’ or ‘making the dog lick’. The Portuguese refer to it as ‘little fish, while the Japanese, poetically, call it ‘cutting water’.
Safe to say, I assume, that where there’s water, flat stones and man, there’s always likely to be a session of ducks & drakes. (As an aside, this phrase ‘ducks & drakes’ has evolved further in the English language and come to mean the reckless handling or squandering of something of value. You could play ducks & drakes with your salary, for instance.)
Anyhow, the game itself isn’t purely geared to lonely men sitting by the riverside wondering what to do with their time (especially in these days of multi-faceted social connectivity; the image of such a lonely man is fast fading because such a man even in his riverside solitude is more likely these days to be connected to Facebook. Aloof, but very much in touch.)
As I was starting to say, stone skimming actually has had world championships held in its name, and world records created and broken! Sixty-five skips of a stone is thought to be one of the all-time records. The information that I don’t have, however, is how these sixty-five ‘skims’ across the water’s surface were measured. What was the instrument used and what was it called? I would welcome feedback on that. I actually started doing a bit of humble background research into Ducks & Drakes only after a chance encounter with a former stone-skimming enthusiast and retired teacher, now in his seventies. Dougie (his name, short for Douglas I imagine) could skim his stone, “a fair few times” according to him, employing traditional Australian modesty.
“A fair few” turns out to be around seventeen or eighteen! Yikes, I thought to myself, recalling that in my attempts at the game I had never managed to send my stone across the water more than three times. Which of course turned me instantly into an admirer of Dougie’s skills and desirous of knowing more.
Turns out, he found a way of marrying stone skimming and classroom activities... imagination building with his ten-year-olds, that is. In his English classes. His approach was simple. ‘How far can you take a single word and ‘skim’ it across the waters of your mind, adding one other word to it with each further skim?) Pencil and paper at the ready, start jotting: rabbit, hopping, whiskers, twitching, farm, carrots, juicy, fence, burrow, under, nibble, snap, farmer, trap, water, boiling, kettle, whistling, barbecue? No, rabbit, stew. (That example, said Dougie, was more or less the exact words given to him by one ten-year-old who lived with his dad on a farm. Dougie remembers it even after ten years because he’s recounted it so often.)
As a former teacher myself it’s worth putting the word-skimming idea out there.
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.
