SPINNING TOPS

New Zealand Tablet, 24 July 1913, Page 61

SPINNING TOPS

Spinning a top has been a favorite amusement of small boys—yes, and of some fairly big boys, too—for a good many hundred' years. Suidas mentions tops among the toys of Grecian lads away back in remote times, and Roman boys spun them in the days of Virgil. '!7 ,-:'-' . '■ J, As for the name, top (says the Ave Maria)'; it is probably just one form of the old word, toy. The notion that a top is so called ' because it is sharpened to a tip or top on which it is spun/ or ' from whirling around on its top or point,' is-quite .incorrect.' Any boy knows that a top doesn't spin on its tip, which is the bottom. One of the big dictionaries defines the top as ' a children's toy of conical, ovoid (egg-shaped), or. circular shape, whether solid or hollow, sometimes of wood with a point of metal, sometimes entirely of metal, made to whirl on its point by the rapid unwinding of-a string wound . about it, or by lashing with a whip, or by utilising the power of a spring.' Now, this definition is not complete. It says nothing of the old-time top, or peg-top, which' one's' big brother, or one's self, used to make by taking a wooden spool from which the thread had all been unwound, and whittling half of it into a miniature 'cone, then putting a round stick through the hole, sharpening the lower end to a point and leaving the upper end projecting from the top of the spool. The spinning used to be done by taking this upper end of the stick, or axis, between the thumb and either the index or the second finger, and whirling it vigorously. Whenever the top began to wobble, one used to talk of 'watching the old cat die,'—a process of which, by the way, the unsatisfactory big dictionary referred to above makes no mention at all. We haven't any doubt that this was the particular variety of the toy which Blessed Thomas More meant when he wrote: ' A toppe can I set, and' dryve it in his kynde.'