'Over and Over Till He Came to the Bottom'

In John Clare’s “The Village Minstrel” I found an old word given a new meaning for an old usage: 

“Often did I view the shade

Where once a nest my eyes did fill,

And often mark’d the place I play’d

At ‘roly poly’ down the hill.”

 

I knew roly poly as an adjective referring to a fat man. Oliver Hardy was roly poly. Donovan used it in “Hurdy Gurdy Man.” For a silly near-nonsense word it has many spellings and meanings. As a noun it can mean “a worthless person; a rascal,” according to the OED. It can refer to “any of various games which feature the rolling of a ball or other object.” Here is Dr. Johnson’s definition of “rollypooly” in his Dictionary: “a sort of game, in which, when a ball rolls into a certain place, it wins. A corruption of roll ball into the pool.” Roly poly can refer to a dance, a pudding, an Australian tumble-weed and a terrestrial crustacean, among other things.

 

Clare’s usage is my favorite: “a game in which people, esp. children, roll down a bank or grassy slope.” I remember rolling down a hill covered with white clover, not noticing that it was also covered with honey bees. I ended up covered with stings. There is literary precedent for such hill rolling. In 1764, at the age of 54, Dr. Johnson accepted an invitation from the writer Bennet Langton to visit his family home in Lincolnshire. In his biography of Johnson, W. Jackson Bate sets the scene:

 

“For whatever reason, Langton never told it to Boswell, though he passed on so much other information to him. Perhaps he simply thought Boswell would not have understood it. But he always remembered it, and as an elderly man told the story to a friend of his son when they were out walking and came to the top of a very steep hill. Back in 1764 Johnson and the Langtons had also walked to the top of this hill, and Johnson, delighted by its steepness, said he wanted to ‘take a roll down.’ They tried to stop him. But he said he ‘had not had a roll for a long time,’ and taking out of his pockets his keys, a pencil, a purse, and other objects, lay down parallel at the edge of the hill, and rolled down its full length, ‘turning himself over and over till he came to the bottom.’”