Playing Cards? You Got That Right!

If you've ever wanted to learn more about playing cards, now is your big chance. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck
and Jerry's here too, so that makes this a rough
and tumble, root and tooting episode of Stuff you Should Know.

(00:23):
How you doing? I'm great? How are you pretty good?
You just celebrated a birthday just twenty four hours ago,
and dude, happy birthday, Chuck. Thanks man. How do you
feel good? Feel great? I feel I'm tired today, but
not because of birthdays. I'm just I don't know, I'm

(00:43):
tired today. Do you remember the times back, years back
when you would be tired because of your birthday? Right exactly.
It's like that day after right exactly. Now you're just
tired because you're a full year older. Yeah. I was
tired before my birthday too. But we're not talking about
being tired or birthdays, Chuck, are We were talking about

(01:06):
playing cards? Yeah, this one. Dave Russ helped us out.
This is chock full of fun little nuggets that I
think next time you're playing cards with people, you can
just kind of pepper these in. Yeah, and they'll love
you for it. They'll say, give us another one. Yeah.
This is one of those. It just has lots and
lots and lots of little fun factoids. And yes, I

(01:28):
said factoids. Yeah, they're ten percent of a fact that's right.
Anyone will get that. A couple of people will on
the Army page. I'm sure so, Chuck. We talked a
lot about playing cards before in our Tarot episode, Yeah,
And one of the things we talked about was that

(01:49):
it's a myth that playing cards developed from taro, which
is what I had always thought too. I don't know,
I don't remember if I said that on the Tarot episode,
but it was quite the opposite, and cards were around
long before Tarot cards were, even though they are related.
Tarot cards were originally invented as new Trump cards basically,

(02:10):
and then they kind of evolved into the cartomancy and
all that stuff and just took off from there and
went on their own path. But playing cards themselves are
much much older, and there's a lot of debate about
exactly where the first playing cards were developed, and a
lot of people say China. Obviously China invented a bunch
of stuff, and it's possible China did invent playing cards,

(02:33):
but they seem to have possibly invented them in isolation,
and they may or may not have influenced the playing
cards that we trace our lineage back to our playing
cards today, trace that's lineage back to Yeah, and they
may not be as far as the original Chinese cards
go as old as they think, because you know, some

(02:55):
people point to this game called the yazyge. Yeah, I'll
go with that, Okay, y e z I separate word
ge called the Chinese leaf game. And this was like
ninth century CE Tang dynasty time, and for a long time,
people I think were like, well, the leaves and the

(03:16):
leaf game were pieces of paper and probably cards. But
then more, you know, scrutiny has landed on. No, maybe
the leaves were just like a rule book or a
log book that you wrote stuff down because it was
really a dice throwing game. Or it could have been
more like dominoes, and the cards are used in that
way but not used like actual playing cards. But we

(03:39):
do think we know pretty sure that the Chinese eventually
did get their playing cards in isolation in the thirteenth century,
not I mean pretty close to when Europe got them. Yeah,
So twelve ninety four is the first unambiguous reference to
actual what we would call playing cards in China. Europe
they showed up in thirteen five, so that is a

(04:02):
really really short amount of time for China to have
influenced Europe. That's not where European cards came from. Instead,
European cards came from the mom Luke Empire, which I
believe we also talked about in the Tarot episode two, right,
I think so in Egypt. Yeah, And it's it's interesting

(04:23):
like these cards came about because of or they got popularized,
I guess because of trick taking games, like not the
exact games we play today like yuker in spades and hearts,
and I think bridge is another one, but the kind
of a similar thing where you have, you know, a
suit that takes the hand aka the trick, right, and

(04:44):
there's usually a trump card or a trump suit. And
these were like among the very first card games, and
apparently in medieval times they were wild for this game. Yeah,
these kinds of games. They went so nuts that some
officials were like, you have to stop playing that. We're
going to actually ban in it. You don't, we don't
get it, and you guys are into it, so we're
gonna say you can't do that anymore, right, But those

(05:06):
mom luke cards from Egypt were pretty similar to what
we have today, right, Yeah, so there's fifty two in
a deck, which is all we have today. Four suits, check,
thirteen cards, pursuit, yes we have okay, yeah, yeah, because

(05:27):
yes that's right. So yes, that thirteen times four is
fifty two. Well, I think where I'm getting mixed up
is they had a number one card, but they did
not have a queen. Is that the swap correct? Okay?
So yeah, they had a one card one through ten,
and then they had courts in cards, which we call
court cards or face cards today. But like you said,

(05:48):
they didn't have a queen. The queen wasn't introduced until
the French in the i think the fifteenth century, said no,
we need to feminize this a little bit and much
fur the better. But back in the Arab world they
were like, no, we're not doing that. This is the
third twelfth thirteenth century. Um, we're just gonna go with
the malik, the king, the naib malik, which would be

(06:12):
the king's like right hand man. Sure, the Thani naive
which would be the king's right hand man, right hand man, Yes,
and Um, that was it. Those were the those in
addition to one through ten, those were your thirteen cards
in each suit and the suits themselves, Um, the like

(06:34):
the cards had a lot of similarities to what we
think of today, Like they had pips. Each suit was
represented by a symbol that's called a pip um And
I knew that somewhere in the back of my head.
I'm not sure why. But if you looked at one
of these cards, one of these very ancient mom Luke

(06:54):
deck cards, Um, there would be say like um, thirteen
or say eight pips on one card. That's the aid
of say cups. If there were eight cups of it,
just like today, if there's eight little spades on there,
that's the aid of spades. I mean, this is it
follows in a really old tradition, I guess is what
I'm trying to say in a really really clumsy way. Well,

(07:17):
the difference is they didn't write a number eight. They
just had eight of the pips pictured to represent that number.
And we still have that. We just added the number
as well. Exactly. We've got both, yes, and we'll get
to there, because it's I think the history of how
these things sort of change from country to country as
they became the leading manufacturers. Is pretty interesting, it really is.

(07:39):
That's a will take over from here every century or so. Yeah,
and I think it looks like as far as Europe goes,
the Spanish and the Italians were the first to start
manufacturing and using playing cards. They were called are called
Latin decks, and they had as their four suits the cups,
the coins, the swords in the clubs. But instead of

(08:04):
I don't think we mentioned that a polo stick was
the club and the mamluke cards, Spain said, what the
heck is polo? Our clubs look like something you beat
someone over the head with, So that's what we're gonna
go with. Yeah, they look like real Captain caveman type stuff. Yeah,
it's kind of cool. So um, the Spanish being among
the first to start adopting these decks is pretty pretty

(08:27):
appropriate because they were under rule by the Moops or
they had been for you know, just a few centuries before,
so they were in a lot of contact with their
Muslim neighbors. So for that to be imported to Spain
and then probably trickle over to Italy, that makes a
lot of sense. And so um, that's kind of reflected

(08:48):
in what the Spanish word for playing cards is naipas
anaipees and the Arabic name for playing cards is naive
n a apostrophe ib clearly descended from it. And that's
one of the things that really fascinates me about playing
card history is like, yes, there's neat like symbolism and

(09:10):
weird stuff going on, but it's all explicable and it
all follows like in this neat tradition that was built
upon and change but really still kind of kept like
the general guard rails that it was originally set up with. Yeah,
and there the changes are like kind of fairly minor,
and they usually have to do with whatever made the

(09:32):
most sense in that country. For instance, in Spain, not
knowing what a polo club was, right, but they're like,
you can hit somebody over the head with that, so
we'll replace it with the club. Yeah, we'll use the smasher. Right.
And there are some speculation in theories about what these
initial and this is in the medieval society, what these
four suits represented. But one of the theories that kind

(09:54):
of makes sense, I think, is that the sword was
for the military or the nobles, the cup for the clergy.
The coin for the merchants makes sense, and the club
for the peasants. And then in Europe we moved to Germany,
they kind of took over in the fifteenth century as
making as being I guess champion cardmakers. Sure, and they

(10:16):
replaced the cup with a heart. It's getting a little
more like we know it now. Yeah, the club was
replaced by an acorn, which is a type of masts.
The sword becomes a leaf, but if you look at it,
it's sort of a similar shape is what we would
know as a spade. Yeah, it's like an ivy leaf almost. Yeah.

(10:37):
And then the coin because there were nuts about falconry
in fifteenth century Germany and falcons head bells attached to
the hawks and falcons. I guess why don't they call
it hawkry? I think falcons take the cake in falconry.
You know, hawks place second fiddle to it. They're like
the the Thanny naihib to the to the falcons. You know.

(11:03):
The joke here in Atlanta that I use is, whenever
we see a hawk or a falcon, and we have
both obvious as Evan inspired sports teams, Uh, it only
says is that a hawker a falcon, and I said, well,
you'd know it's a falcon if it flew into a
tree and then hit the ground. What does that mean
the reference to the Atlanta falcons. Oh, I see, yeah,

(11:24):
like it was like I'm flying so high and then no,
not anymore all of a sudden. Yeah exactly. But I
mean this isn't the same apply to the hawks too,
never get off the ground. No, you could kind of
interchange them. Yeah, but anyway, the falcons and hawks had bells,
and the coin on the German cards became a bell

(11:45):
because they were wild about falconry. Yeah, it's very cute.
The Germans had definitely the most rustic pips of all time.
I mean, an acorn. Come on, that's wonderful. So the
Germans are going along. This is the fifteenth century. They
dominated that as far as the card manufacturing went, and
then the French took over in the sixteenth century and Ruin,

(12:09):
which is kind of in the northwest of France, became
the playing card capital of Europe. And one of the
reasons it became the playing card capital of Europe, as
we'll see, is because they put out so many playing
cards and their production increased so dramatically that it's just
mind boggling. And as a result, the pips that the

(12:31):
French adapted are the ones we still use today, even
though we have different names. They were the ones who
came up with the designs we used today. Yeah, so
they were hearts and clovers. Self explanatory. They had the diamonds,
but their diamonds were represented paving tiles called carol. And
then the pike, which is the spear tip. I guess

(12:54):
is the spade right, just right? But they didn't yeahlways
give me with that. They don't. They didn't call it
a spade at the time. But they did a couple
of key things as far as what we recognized as
playing cards today, as they came up with the red
and the black colors, very big deal to differentiate that
and to make card tricks more fun. And then they,

(13:16):
like you said, they manufactured a ton of them. And
they did this because they standardized the pips so that
they could be stenciled on and it was a lot
cheaper and a lot faster than hand drawing or doing
woodcuttings and hand painting these decks of cards, which was
super expensive and time consuming. Yes, and it made the cards,

(13:37):
the deck of cards incredibly unattainable to the average person
back in the you know, up to the sixteenth century
when the French took over. And once the French took
over and started producing these cards on mass, card playing
was just it just took off like a rocket. And

(13:57):
people had already loved playing cards, but now more people
could love playing cards. And it was because they figured
out how to print these things, you know, more cheaply
and more quickly. So that's why we use the French
card today, just by virtue of the fact that they
produced so many that it became like the dominant type
of card in the world. And then the other reason

(14:18):
I saw is that England eventually adopted the French card
and then kind of put their own twist on it,
basically just renaming it. And then British colonialism is one
reason why so many people around the world used the
French deck today. So they took the French deck and
spread it around the world. Yeah, and so the English,

(14:38):
like you said, they sort of they used the same
pip icons. I was about to say logo, but I
guess they're icons, and they just sort of changed the meaning.
So the clover they went back to calling it the club,
even though it's a clover when you look at it.
So that's why you've you've ever wondered, why the heck
did they call that thing a club. That's why it's

(14:59):
a tip to the mouth of the ogs, right, yeah, exactly. Yeah,
the spade looks like sort of the head of us
a spade, a type of shovel. But we think that
the suit name actually, probably, and this makes a lot
of sense, is the anglicized version of espada, which means
sword in Spanish, because sword was the original suit. And

(15:21):
then the diamond they just called the diamond. But they said,
you know what, this has nothing to do with dumb
paving tiles. Let's just call it a diamond. And as
Dave so aptly puts, a heart is just a herd?
Is that an actual song? Or are you making up
your aunt that just made that up? But I bet
you there's a song that goes a heart is just
a heart? Well you really, you really do that in actuality? Huh? Well,

(15:44):
that didn't really count. It's usually more like and by
the way, we heard from a lot of listeners who
do this. I know. Yeah, you're death so far from yeah,
I don't. I didn't think I was unique in anyway,
but it's Um, it's usually like sung to the lyrics
or sung to the tune of an other song, right,
like when you're a heart, You're a heart all the
way like that exactly. I looked up that where that

(16:10):
heart shape came from, because if you think about it,
our hearts don't really resemble that very much like the
human heart. Yes, and I know I cannot find the
original source. There's a lot of debate over it, but
it's centuries old, and prior to it, when it first
started to emerge, um, the heart was kind of iconogrified,

(16:35):
m agrifized. I don't know. I think you had it right, okay,
um as a kind of a pine cone shape. Oh,
which is a little more accurate. But I like the
new heart icon new meaning centuries old, but the most
recent one. Ye mean, that'd be very funny if it
looked like the actual human heart. Yeah, he just you know,

(16:59):
the guy in Temple of Doom just pulls out like
this hard emoji from the guy's chest. Uh. Should we
take a break? Yes, I think we should. All right,
We're gonna take a break and get to those face
cards right after this. All right, so we mentioned the courts,

(17:39):
and cards aka face cards is how we know them today.
They represented the royal court, of course, and just like today,
back then they were the the you know, the champion cards,
the most valuable on the deck. We'll get to the ace.
There was no ace card yet, and I think the
story of the ace card is pretty cool anyway, so
we'll save that. Uh, but these cards were all men until,

(18:03):
like you mentioned before, the French introduced the queen, and
here to me is one of the first really fun
facts of the episode that I love is for a
long long time, and I guess they don't do it anymore.
But in the UK and in British India they would
follow what they called Commonwealth rule or British rule, which
is to say that the king and the queen can

(18:25):
flip flop in which one is better in status depending
on who the monarch is at the time. So if
you have a woman on the throne, then the queen
is the top card, just below the ace or until
the ace was came along. Yeah, pretty cool. Yeah, agreed. Well,
something I didn't realize is that for many centuries, the

(18:48):
kings the queens and the jacks, which were at the
time called the knaves, were actually modeled on historical figures. Yeah,
like Charlemagne was the of hearts. I believe King David,
the guy who killed um Goliath, he was spades, Julius
Caesar was diamonds, and Alexander the Great was clubs. Had

(19:10):
no idea, but like, if you look at a super
old deck and I'm guessing somewhere around probably up into
the nineteenth century, at some point you could say, yeah,
of course that's Charlemagne. I'd recognize him anyway. Look at
that beard on King David, right, he's juggling a rock yep.
Do we should we go through? The queens and the
jacks are just suffice to say that they stood for people. No,

(19:33):
I think we should give him a shout out. The
queens were Palace of Athena, Judith, Rachel, and Argene, which
could be an anagram for Regina. That's all over the
place if you if you search Argene, the only thing
that comes up is the card name, So there doesn't

(19:55):
seem to have been a historical person named Argene. Yeah,
this is one of those upon research that it's kind
of like it's difficult to corroborate some of this stuff.
But you see the same facts everywhere, which a lot
of times, you know, when we did our episode on
how to research stuff, well that can be a big
red flag. Yeah, but maybe this is a case where

(20:15):
it's not so much a red flag and just like
lore that people have just agreed upon. Yeah, because you know,
if it is, if there is a red flag attached
to it, we usually turn it up eventually, and this
one just didn't seem to have it. But yes, I'm
with you. It smelled like it, but upon a much
deeper smell, I was like, Okay, this might this might

(20:35):
actually work. Who were the jacks? The jacks were Hector,
who was the hero from the Greek city of Troy,
Etienne de Vignoles, who was a hero of the Hundred
Years War in France. Okay, Ogier the Dane who was
Charlemagne's night and either Judah maccabee or Lancelot was the

(20:57):
Nave of clubs, and Jude mcabee was from the Hannakas story.
Lancelot was one of King Arthur. Yeah, the Maccabees. So yeah,
if depending on the deck you had it would it
would basically you would you just knew back in the
day that if you're playing the King of Hearts, that
was Charlemagne right there. It wasn't just this yeah, generic
weird looking king. Um, it was supposed to be somebody, Yeah,

(21:21):
a brand name king exactly. And speaking of brand name kings,
the god to talk about the suicide king, definitely, that
is the king that looks like he's stabbing himself in
the head with a sword. That is the one if
you're looking at a modern deck of cards, that's the
King of Hearts, And that's the one that looks most
different from the other kings in that he has four

(21:43):
hands and does not have the mustache, which is interesting. Yeah,
and like I said, appears to be stabbing himself with
a sword. For a long time, there was a legend
that that's how Charlemagne took his life, but we know
that's not true, right because he died of pleurisy. But
what they now think is that the early French decks

(22:06):
Anglo French decks had a King of Hearts with an
axe above his head, and that just printing over time,
the axe went kind of further and further down until
it was behind his head such that you couldn't even
see the axe blade, and so I guess that axe
handle just became a sword, looking like it was going
into the king's head. Yeah. And now that you know,

(22:26):
so like that axe was originally it was like the
King of Hearts was captured in the back swing, like
he was about to chop somebody with his axe, right, yeah. Yeah,
And now if you know that, you can see that
the King of Hearts is now just doing the same
thing with a sword. He's in the back swing. Yeah,
lob someone's head off, right, but not his own. Yeah, either.

(22:49):
One The important point is someone's head is about to
come off. They don't care whether it's lob or lop.
Look at that. No mustache, Yeah, no mustache. And one
other thing, the King of Diamonds now is the only
one with an axe, which I never noticed before. I
didn't either. I mean, you don't often, or at least

(23:10):
I don't often sit around and look at it a
deck of cards like I play cards, but I never
study them because it's sort of one of those things
that's so ubiquitous in your life over the years that
you don't really it's interesting. Might tie into our semantic
assaciation short stuff coming up. Nice tease. But let's talk

(23:32):
about that Ace card, because it took a while for
the Ace, and it has a really neat story of
how it happened. But it took a while for the
Ace to become the high card because when the Ace
eventually did come along, it was the number one and
it was the lowest card. It was the worst card
on the deck. It was so lowly that they referred

(23:53):
to it as an AS, which was the least valuable
coin in the Roman Empire. But then the French changed that, right, yeah,
which is this is why the Ace can sometimes be
the highest card in the deck or serve as the
number one card. Because if you ever, if you've never
noticed before, the number cards started two. You go through

(24:13):
two through nine, right, no, two through ten? Yeah, yes, absolutely,
I'm one hundred percent certain two or ten. But this
as the AS card. It was named after the least
valuable coin in the Roman Empire, and it was kind
of like a slang term to kind of just talk
about how lowly that one card was. Then the French

(24:34):
Revolution came along and they kind of conceptually pitted the
AS card against the court cards. They said, you know what,
this lowly one. We're gonna make it topple the court,
the King, the queen, the jack, and now the Ace
is the top of the heap. This little lowly single

(24:55):
card is now higher than any of the other ones.
And then, by the way, they also change the King, Queen,
and Jack to liberties, equalities, and fraternities. So they didn't
they weren't really into them kings and queens around the
French Revolution very much. Yeah. And if you've ever wondered
why the ace is the most sort of lavishly decorated

(25:17):
card generally speaking, it's got a cool story behind that
one too. Yeah. So the British had a pretty interesting
solution to taxing decks of cards, which was, if you
were a card maker, you had to you couldn't print
your own Ace of Spades. You had to get that
from the government as an official you know, card of

(25:38):
the British Empire, right, Yeah, and that was your that
was your tax and they were as such, they were
very highly decorated. They were uniquely stamped to try and
prevent forgeries from happening, right, And you couldn't, like as
a card manufacturer, if you were just like, forget that,
I'm not gonna We're just gonna print our own Ace
of Spades and they'll never know. You could be hung

(26:00):
or have your head lopped off or lobbed off. You
could be hanged, you mean the penalty what they hung.
The penalty was death if you've forged an Ace of
Spades playing card. Yeah, there's a man named Richard Harding, which,
as far as I or anybody else can tell, was
hanged for forging an Ace of Spades, and that nuts.
That is crazy to think about in a weird I guess,

(26:24):
it sounds like a weird way to pull off attacks,
but it's also sort of brilliant in a way. Yeah,
But I mean that's why. So each company had their
own design, and it was a lavish design, and that's
why still today the Ace of Spades just stands out
as the most lavishly designed card. There's one other thing
about that too. While they were during that period, I

(26:45):
think in the early nineteenth century to the mid nineteenth century,
the name for those Ace of Spades was Old Frizzle
Old Frizzle. Yeah. I found that on a website. There
was a post about the evolution of the or the
history of the evolution of playing cards, written by a
game reviewer named enders game. I thought it was gonna

(27:06):
be snoop dog no no. But it does have a
definite snoop quality too, it doesn't it. Yeah, that's kind
of fun. If you've ever you know, bicycle playing cards
are very popular brand. I prefer the aviation poker cards personally, okay,
but I like a good bicycle deck. If you've ever
looked at the Ace of Spades, you might see the

(27:27):
number eight O eight on there. And there's long been
speculation that there was some sort of cryptic meaning behind
what the AD eight does. And apparently it's just a
model number because they had earlier decks that were six
H six is. So there's no like kind of fun
hidden meaning to that. No, And Bicycle is not its
own company. It's actually the eighth edition of the US

(27:50):
playing card companies designs, right, it's the eighth design that
came up with. So that's what the A eight is.
And so you'll find that a too on the Ace
of Spades. You said, right, as spades, baby, So that
As of Spades in particular, the bicycle aid Ace of
Spades has a really storied history as far as world

(28:10):
wars go. Apparently a world War two, the Ace of
Spades was considered a lucky card, and so sometimes you'd
see soldiers carrying the Ace of Spades around with them, Yeah,
or you see you see it a lot in the
tucked in the helmet in those war movies. Yes, And
this is why most often you'll see it in Viet
movies about the Vietnam War. There is a myth that

(28:33):
was apparently considered correct at the time, that the Vietcong
viewed the Ace of Spades as a symbol of death.
The legend was that French cartomancers who had occupied the
country previous to the war had basically introduced them to
the Ace of Spades as a as a doom card,

(28:55):
and that the Vietcong were just scared to death of it.
That's the legend, But that's not true. From what I saw,
it seems to not necessarily be true. What now, we're
coming into the true part. There were a couple of lieutenants,
I believe in Charlie Company, who rode into the Bicycle
um to the US Playing Card Company, makers of bicycle cards,

(29:18):
and explain this and said, could we just get decks
of nothing but the Ace of Spades and US Playing
Card company said, you got it, And for the war effort,
they actually did produce decks of nothing but Ace of
Spades for US soldiers to use to scare or intimidate
the Vietcong. Yeah, and they were called the bicycle trademarked brand,

(29:40):
the Bicycle secret Weapon. And apparently they would they would
drop these cards throughout the villages and the jungles and
stuff just to sort of, you know, freak them out
or Yeah. But even if it didn't work, as you know,
because the Vietcong were already primed to be afraid of
the aces, you would probably start to associate it with

(30:02):
some bad stuff if any time you came upon like
a fallen soldier of yours with an Ace of Spades
on his chest laying in the jungle. Sure, even if
it hadn't already had that connotation before, I'm sure it
developed that connotation pretty quickly just by use of it. Yeah.
By the way, I came across one of my closet

(30:24):
the other day and I came across my box of
trading cards. Oh yeah, yeah, And I popped him out
and kind of looked through them real quick. The one
thing I forgot that I had in addition to all
those Star Wars cards. And it turns out I have
a lot of Star Wars cards and I looked in there.
Apparently they're not valuable or not very valuable. But I
had a bunch of Superman the movie trading cards. I

(30:47):
remember those, man, Yeah, like there their photographs from the movie, right, yeah, yeah,
just like little scene stills or whatever. I remember those.
And then also, even though I don't even remember necessarily
being that into the show, I guess I watched it
a little bit. But I also have some Battlestar Galactica
cards eighties version obviously, uh. And then a fair amount

(31:10):
of football, NBA, hockey, but mostly baseball cards right that
I think are all basically worthless. You just jogged my memory.
I remember now that they had Rambo trading cards for
a little while. Oh, I would have loved to have
had those kind of I guess it was three where

(31:31):
he's like shirtless and shooting like rockets at at people.
I mean, I was a First Blood guy. Uh. And
then you know, the Rambo's got a little more ridiculous
with each one, you could say, But I stand by
First Blood as being a really great movie. Yeah it is.
It's a good movie, but it's it's it's a different
genre than the other two, you know what I mean. Agree,

(31:55):
although I do have to say that First Blood never
produced the greatest chewing gum of all time. Second greatest
chewing gum of all time Rambo chewing gum, which is
BlackBerry flavored Big League Chew. Oh my god, it was
good and it was second only to lemon lime bubble yum,
the kind that was green on the outside with the
yellow center. Yeah. I love that stuff. There's a pack

(32:18):
for sale on eBay, and every once in a while,
I'm like, what did it still work? Could I still
chew it? Should I buy that a good toothbreaker? Yeah? Probably,
but me and that'd be amazing. Did the big leage
chew have a little caricature of Rambo in it? It
had like a movie still of him shirtless with the
rocket launcher shooting it at somebody and like a big

(32:39):
fire explosion in the background, that rocket launcher. Yeah, and
you'd just put the whole pack in your cheek and
be like, somebody came me a rocket launcher. It's amazing
how many products they marketed at us were phony tobacco products.
Oh yeah, I used to do. Remember beef jerky chew.
It was like a candid dip, but it was trying

(32:59):
to be jernky. I love that stuff. The gum cigarettes
that you could puff on. They still have those. I
saw those recently. Did they really? And I was like, what,
they still make these in my local convenience store. Wow,
that's very surprising. Yeah, it was pretty funny. What about
those um pink gum cigars? I don't remember those they

(33:20):
were They were just a long stick of gum in
the shape of a cigar and then it had like
a cigar band wrapper on it. And they tasted awful.
It was the most awful gum there was worse than
like the sticks that you would get an old baseball
card packs. But um, it was just a different taste
and it was not good gum. But they were still

(33:40):
fun to like, you know, pretend you're a up and
coming smoker with. I wonder if there's a candy cane
blunt or something like that, we don't know about it.
I suddenly realized why I started smoking at age fourteen.
I was kind of primed to do that. Also, before
we break a no, we're tangenting on tangents. But I
meant to clear up when I that story about Emily

(34:01):
getting a note from her mom to buy cigarettes at
the at the store. Yeah, she was like six years old.
This wasn't a teenage thing because you were like, yeah,
I bought him when I was ten or eleven. She
was younger than my daughter. And just the thought of
her going into a store at that age, a child
and getting cigarettes, because you have noticed just it doesn't

(34:22):
get any more seventies in that, I'm well, not just that,
it's very Ohio too. Yeah, so much so I'm going
to coin a new term. That's so higo. Okay, yeah,
I like you using that from now on. All right,
h well, let's reel it in, take a break, and
we'll come back and talk about the Joker or the

(34:44):
Yoker right after this. Okay, Chuck, you really teased it up.

(35:14):
Right before this this ad break, m we're gonna talk
about Uker and which is where the Joker came from?
You play Uker? Yeah, we've talked about it on the
Show's that's right. My Ohio relatives introduced me to it,
and I had to get it re explained every Christmas
because I could just could never remember the rules right,
Yuker is very so high. Yes, it's so HIGHO. But

(35:37):
Uker came from the Alsace region of Germany, and it
was originally called yuker Spiel. Okay, yeah, with the with
the j u c k Yes, j u c k
e r spiel. Whereas what's the Uker card game? How's
that spelled that we play today? It's spelled you or

(35:57):
sorry e U c h r E Yuker And then
Dave points out like Eucharist, and I think he was
trying to trigger in us a mention that he's the
host of the hit podcast Biblical Time Machine, so I
think he put that in there. Was that what it was? Okay,
although there's not many words out there that are like
the word yuker, but we we latinized it right from

(36:20):
j u c k e r to e U c
h r E. But originally that j u c k
e rum. In America, people started calling it Juker with
the hard J like the j pronounced not like a why.
And then that very quickly became Joker, which was a
card that was designed expressly for the game of Uker. Right,

(36:43):
that's right, the jolly Joker, who has always been sort
of a sort of a court gester e imp like person. Uh,
and they think that that's a reference to that the
Joker and Uker was a trickster who took the tricks
of the game because it was the super trump card. Yeah, exactly,

(37:04):
like the number one trump card. And we're not going
to go over Yuker. But it's all about the Trump
cards and descending value of the bower and the left
bower right and then the uber card, which is the
Yuker or the Joker. And they call those those original
trump cards the right and left bower bower like they're
in the act of bowing. But that's actually a bastardization

(37:27):
of the German bower b aue r, which means farmer
in German m like Jack Bauer. Yeah. So it's really
interesting to see how just completely mixed up things can get. Yeah,
when you just change the spelling of a word, didn't
even pronounce it the same, but just change some spellings
here or there, and all of a sudden you have

(37:49):
you've just completely lost its original meaning and adopted a
new one. I find that fascinating. But anyway to sum
this up, the Joker was created to become the best Bower,
the Imperial Bower, and then over time, because it was
associated expressly with Yuker Joker, it became the joker. That's right.
And we're going to finish up with some fun poker

(38:11):
facts slash Las Vegas facts. Yeah, here's one. Barry Manlo
has his own blackjack tables. Yes, we've seen them with
our own eyes. Didn't play on them because I didn't
want to desecrate it by losing on a Barry Manlin table.
But playing cards and gambling obviously is you know, people
started gambling with playing cards a long long time ago,

(38:33):
and when it comes to poker or really any kind
of card game you're gambling with, they wanted to understandably
not had their cards be seen by other people. So
these sort of gigantic icons of suits and these bigger
fonts and things like that wasn't working out. So for
poker cards, they introduced a few a few little changes

(38:56):
to make this more possible to hold your hand tighter together,
and that is called the squeezer card, which was you know,
the first cards to have a very small symbol at
the top left corner indicating the number and the pip
or the suit right and so that means that's why
on you see a poker player holding that really tight hand,
all you need is that left hand corner barely exposed. Yeah,

(39:19):
and those little the little the pip with the number
or the letter of the face card is called an indicy.
Those are indices, and before them the reason why it
makes so much sense in poker, Like you were saying,
you used to have to spread your cards out wide
to say like, oh, there's nine pips on here, this
is a nine of clubs. And now it was just

(39:41):
kind of marked in the corner, which is great because
you're not sharing your hand with the other people. There
was another way you could give away what kind of
cards you had in old style cards, and that the
face cards, the court cards were printed one direction. There
was one direction that was up, in one direction that
was down, not like today where they're both up or down.

(40:02):
It doesn't matter which way it's dealt. Before you would
have had to have taken that court card and flipped
it around if it was dealt to you upside down,
and you would have just told everybody at the table,
I have at least one face card in here. Yeah,
with total giveum and think about the mom looks. They
had to sit there an out loud go four, five, six,

(40:24):
and they would have to count those pips and everyone
would Now you have a six of something, right, But
that's what that's what the poker players had to do too.
But like off, until you had the squeezer cards, I
thought they had the number on there. They just had
a bigger number. I don't they had the number at all.
I know, I don't think they had the number at
all until the Squeezer the Indussease cards were introduced. And

(40:44):
there was one other thing about it too. Why would
they do that because other decks of plane cards had
numbers on them, Why didn't they just use those like
prior to the nineteenth century? No, just prior to the
squeezer card they did. So the squeezer card came out
in the nineteenth century, is what I'm saying. Oh have
they been around for that long? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes,

(41:04):
And that's the first time that the actual number was printed. Yes,
before you would just have nine hearts on there. There
you go. I thought they just did it super small. No,
well no, they they put it super small, like out
of the gate. But that was too so you wouldn't
have to spread your cards out and see what you
were dealing with. You see what I'm saying. Sure, the
other thing that was changed with the indices, Chuck, was

(41:25):
remember I said that the jack's used to be called naves,
and a nave is like an assistant to the royal
family basically, or a night or something like that, and
it spelled like night k N A v E. Well,
now that you have the induices and you have a
k Q or J. If you had a k Q
or k N, which is how they initially abbreviated nave,

(41:49):
if you didn't spread your card far enough, you might
think you had a king, but in fact you had
a jack. And they actually changed nave to jack because
of those indusries at the top. Yeah, and they also
used to be white on the back. They didn't even
have fancy decorations, that's right. And you know, if you
have it's very easy to mark a white card with
some smudge or something, or it might just accidentally give

(42:12):
get a smudge or a stain or something. Sure, you're
in derritos at a poker game that they can get everywhere,
and then you know, of course the derrito card is
the ace of spades or whatever. And apparently the Thomas
de la Ruined Company was a British printer who was
first credited with those beautiful lithographic designs on the back
in the early nineteenth century. And I did mention Vegas.

(42:37):
If you dug this stuff up, it's kind of fun.
If you wonder how how much they switched decks of
cards in Vegas. If it's going wild and crazy, they
might switch a deck of cards every hour. Yeah, for
that same reason. They don't want them to get marked
so that somebody would have an advantage by noticing that
there's like a fray on the ace of spades, you know,

(42:58):
right corner or something. Yeah. The most that they use
them for is twelve hours, right, Yeah, I mean that's
that's it. The barry Man Aul just wasn't getting much action.
There was another thing too that a lot of people
point out that we have no idea whether it was
purposeful or not, but it's pretty astounding if it's coincidence,

(43:18):
right about the whole the seasons in the year and
the months and all that. Yeah, fifty two cards, right,
fifty two weeks? Yes, the two colors are they night
and day? Yes? Do those four seats suits represent the
four seasons, perhaps correct, and then what's the last? Just

(43:40):
knock them down. Here, there's twelve court cards, there's twelve
months in the year, there's thirteen cards in each suit,
and there's thirteen full moons in a year. The one
that so up to this point you're like, wow, that's
pretty amazing. This is the one that gets me. If
you count every single pip on all fifty two cards
and add them together, there are three hundred and sixty

(44:00):
five of them. What yeah, and't that neat? That's good stuff.
I agree. And there's a pretty cute ted talk by
a guy named m Marco Tempest from several years back
where he explains all this while doing pretty neat card tricks.
It's it's a good one. You can find it on YouTube.
All right, you got anything else about cards? I got

(44:23):
nothing else about cards. We've done tarot cards, trading cards,
playing cards. I guess greeting cards is next. No, Yeah,
we could do one on the Hallmark company. Maybe they'll
sponsor it. Oh, that's a great idea. We'll talk to
ad sales about that one. Yeah. Well, while we're off
talking to ad sales, Well, we'll hold off on that

(44:43):
and instead do a listener mail first. I'm gonna call
this just to follow up. As I was talking about
people making up their own songs, we heard from quite
a few listeners. It seems like mostly board dads who
do the same thing as I do. This is from
who is this from? This from Jeff? He said, Hey guys.

(45:04):
At the very beginning of the episode, Chuck details how
he makes up songs like That's Tomorrow. My eyes lit up, because, dude,
I do the exact same thing. Maybe it's a common
thing that most people do and they're too embarrassed to
admit to, but I've never met anyone else who claims
they do it. One example from last night I'm particularly
proud of was I was making my three year old
daughter dinner, grabbed the box of Annie's Macaroni and cheese,

(45:26):
shout out to Annie's, and almost involuntary the words. Involuntarily,
the words flew out of my mouth, and I'll go
ahead and sing it in the tune of nights and
whites Happen. Oh, okay, shells and white cheddar. Microwave is
your friend. I don't know what's better When there's not

(45:48):
much to spend. That's pretty good stuff. Yeah, that was
really good. I also had a little social commentary at
the end too. Yeah, and that's from Jeff with a G.
Because it's Annie's brand. I was expecting to say something like,
it's a maccin cheese night for us, you know what
I mean? Huh Wow, I'm getting on that train too, Chuck.

(46:12):
It is intoxicating, isn't it. Well, if you want to
be like Jeff, Jeff and tell us about some amazing
song you came up with, way to go. By the way, Jeff,
that was pretty great. You can email us at stuff
podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is

(46:33):
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.