Francisco de Goya painted Niños Jugando al Balancín in 1792. They’ve just kids, goofing around, making their own plaything from what’s handy. No GameBoys for these game boys. My first impression was how unstable it must be, one round log teetering on another round log. Because there’s no attachment point to hold the top log in place, it’s gonna roll from side to side, too. This arrangement bucked off more kids than the mechanical bulls at Gilley’s and Yosemite Sam’s on Overton Square in the days before 1-800-SUE-THEM.
Is It a Seesaw or a Teeter-Totter? Is There a Difference?
What do you call a long plank with seats on both ends and supported in the middle?
PowerThesaurus says there are 149 synonyms for teeter-totter. We recognize this as beyond unlikely, so we know to steer clear of a site than can’t give us a better answer than that. A few say teeter board, but most call it a seesaw or teeter-totter. Teeter boards are found next to the sliding boards on playgrounds in the South and some Midwestern states.
If you’re like me, you probably think seesaw and teeter-totter are two terms that mean the same thing
Well, we’re wrong. While digging around, I found that where a seesaw just goes up and down, a teeter-totter not only goes up and down but also goes from side to side. It’s designed into some of the rides you see for small kids at the County Fair or at better suburban playgrounds. The kids in Goya’s painting are on a teeter-totter, not the seesaw Wikipedia says it is.
I like seesaw because it’s half the syllables
Oddly, seesaw doesn’t accurately describe what the balancing board does, though. Seesaws go up and down, rotating around a pivot point. Saws go back and forth, like gliders.
When I was in grade school, we didn’t need a slide rule to figure out how to keep things balanced when a fat kid (period-correct) was on one end and a skinny kid was on the other. You won’t find all that much Newtonian physics going on at the playground, but that’s what’s going on.
One way was to add another skinny kid. The other was to make the board on one side longer than the other by moving the balance point. We had no idea what a fulcrum was but we did know it as the point where both sides are evenly balanced.*
I like teeter-totter because it tells me exactly what’s going on
To teeter is to balance unsteadily, swaying back and forth. When we’re teetering and start walking, we’re tottering. One of the few times we come across teeter without totter usually involves someone or something teetering on the brink of disaster. My mind’s eye conjures a car teetering on the edge of the steep cliff on a perilously narrow road cut into the stone mountain.
Come to think of it, I can’t recall any other teetering, although there is a grocery chain called Harris Teeter that was bought by Kroger. The chain began Charlotte, North Carolina stores Harris Drugs and Teeter Food Mart merged in the 1930s.
Teeter-totter is a playful way of mimicking the motion of the plank
People who use big words call this onomatopoeic. Arf, meow, cluck.
Tottering** means walking gently but with difficulty, like my grandmother. As I close in on 80, I know it well. I’ve come to like sitting down so much that I take a folding chair with me wherever I go.
The words seesaw and teeter-totter are examples of reduplication, repeating one word with another of the same kind. Holy moly, roly-poly. Tip-top, flip-flop, ping-pong, ding-dong. Fancy-schmancy, wishy-washy, walkie-talkie, and Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.
The music video is from a 1960 American Bandstand show. Kids all over the U.S. watched it to learn how to dance. The #1 hit on Billboard was by Bryan Hyland, in the days when heartthrob singers wore greasy pompadours. Looked at from today’s perspective, some will find the video a bit creepy.
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* Of course “both sides are evenly balanced.” One side can’t be if the other side isn’t.
** Tottering-by-Gently is a village in North Plimshire, England. Tottering Hall is home to Daffy and Dicky (Lord and Lady Tottering) and their dogs Slobber and Scribble.
Key Takeaway
You can download a seesaw app or play an online teeter-totter game but you’ll never learn a thing without spending some time with a real one.
Readers tell me they always find something new and often find things they thought were so but aren’t. I’m often asked how I can keep finding new things to write about after more than 10 years and 500 articles, columns, and stories. Most are surprised when I tell them the problem isn’t finding them, it’s deciding where to stop. I come across a dozen things every day that I want to know more about. Everything I’ve ever come across looks different when I take the time to look deeper at things most of us just glide over.
Regular readers agree with Dorothy Parker, who said, “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”
Bonus
There are several origin stories that tell of long, narrow boards balanced in the middle so that as one end goes up, the other goes down. My favorite involves Korean girls (period correct) more than 400 years ago.
The strict Korean culture kept its girls and young women behind walls, cut off from the world outside. The girls came up with a clever workaround involving a long board on a center fulcrum and taking turns launching the other high enough to see over the wall. This story’s got a lot of glue, because the tradition continues today on holidays and at Buddhist street festivals. This game of “jumping seesaw” is called neolttwigi. Instead of sitting on the board and pushing upward with their feet, they stand on each end and jump, flipping the other person into the air. I’ll tell you this: it’s a damn good thing we didn’t know the game of jumping seesaws when we were kids.
The Doosan Encyclopedia reports the legend of a wife who wanted to see her husband, trapped in a prison beyond a high wall, could catch a glimpse of her husband’s face by using a neolttwigi in collaboration with another prisoner’s wife.
