Ok, so here's an odd question. The boy narrator and his little brother are on Luna, playing mumblety-peg.

I am not sure what to make of this. The first thing that confuses me is what kind of floors do they have on the moon, since it is usually played in the dirt. What message is Heinlein sending here? That a game children have played for generations will continue to be played? That a mother is so irresponsible, she puts one child in charge of another, and thus, they play a outdoor game indoors, damaging the floors? That knives are acceptable toys for children to play with?

It's a detail I'd never really thought about before.

I'd say RAH was trying to throw a bit of a JD cast on the kids - in that era of fearing all kids were going to grow up wearing leather jackets and hanging around the corner store smoking, it would have resonated. He may not have entirely thought through the point that the knife (and exactly what kind of knife would a kid on Luna in that era be carrying?) has to stick in the ground/floor.

Or maybe he did and your whole assumption about the irresponsibility and carelessness of the parents is on the mark.

Your throw.

As fanciful as sci-fi gets in the realms of ideas, it has to stay rooted pretty close to contemporary dialects and behavioral standards, or it either becomes incomprehensible or those superficial details obscure the point the author was trying to make. See, e.g., "A Clockwork Orange" for an example that makes you work at reading it. Enjoyable work in that case, to be sure, but would you want to expend the same effort to understand a Heinlein novel? So is there really any point in RAH coming up with a futuristic version of a children's game for the sake of futurism, and expend the effort to explain it, when the game is but a spear-carrier in the story?

I do think this is an early (1946 writing) example of Heinlein being concerned about parenting; the parents in this story are fairly incompetent, and allow the youngest child to run the roost.

Part of the choice of mumblety-peg is so that gravity can play with the knife. Boy Scouts still teach whittling by the way, and as a child, I can remember my brothers playing this with their pocketknives, but I wasn't allowed to. They had to wear shoes; that was my mother's precaution.

Hard to say, really. I think the mainstream audience he was going for would have had a moment of recognition, then they would have had the sense of wonder frisson when thinking about what lower gravity would have meant. Most American boys grew up using pocketknives, and playing this game.

I just thought the indoor part, and the mother putting a child in charge of another child, was odd, and might have suggested some commentary on the parenting.

Really, I think you are making too much of this, Robert. I think the main comment is probably -- it's a frontier society. And in that kind of society it is completely routine for an older child to be put in charge of a younger. I agree there may be some tension with "modern" notions of parenting -- was Heinlein aware that he was in the middle of the collapse of parenting in this country?

I dunno, it's an interesting reference. Some Googling around confirms that it was a much more common game in the days before parental/societal paranoia, when pocket knives were a standard accoutrement for boys. It's perhaps less significant than even I thought - no JDism implied, just two boys killing time. I don't think it was meant to be representative of frontier society... just kids of Heinlein's (perceived) day. The notion of sticking the knife indoors is still a valid puzzlement, though - it reads as "bratty" and "unsupervised" to me.

I was always puzzled by the "we were up to noses" reference and found this fairly complete description that makes it clear: http://www.inquiry.net/outdoor/games/be ... ly_peg.htm

The first line of the article James refers us to (http://www.inquiry.net/outdoor/games/beard/mumbly_peg.htm) gives a possible explanation that I'm surprised to be the first to bring up:

Is it not possible that Loonies had grass floors? Certainly grass indoors is a concept mentioned in more than one later RAH work (although I can't recall which ones other than Stranger and possibly Cat Who Walks Through Walls).

One wonders if the grass may have been mentioned in an early version of the Black Pits manuscript and was edited out. Might be worth a look sometime. In the UCSC archives I presume?

You can get a copy from the online archive as well. There are at least two draft mss. in the Op. 53 file.

One thing is for sure: if they were playing mumblety-peg, then the streets of Luna were not paved with metal-- and crushed regolith would have ruined any knives used that way.

Personally, I wouldn't want to expend that effort on the Clockwork Orange. <wry grin> But that's the technical writer coming out in me -- if the style of the book were one I enjoyed, I'd be willing to put in more work. A Clockwork Orange wasn't intended to be fun to read as best I can tell.

I really appreciate Heinlein's plain speaking style.

You don't like the baby-language argot? Sounds like something from In The Night Garden, all wibbly-wonks and ticky-wicks. We just saw that show and I have never seen anything beg out so loudly for an R-rated parody. They speak baby language to our daughter and she appears to understand it. I don't know what they're telling her to do. It could be instructions for revolution.