Dorbel -- the masses have spoken

FPoodry at aol.com FPoodry at aol.com
Thu Apr 19 15:51:35 EDT 2001


>dorbel (n) In rolley-hole marbles tournaments, a two-point bonus score
>awarded when a player passes more than three holes on one turn

When I sent this definition in, Melissa asked me to explain rolley-hole 
marbles to her sometime.  I don't know much about it.  I ran into it about 15 
years ago on a family vacation in a state park in Tennessee, where they hold 
the annual national rolley hole marbles tournament.  (They had a few 
competitors from Kentucky, and maybe another state too, so they called it 
"national.") The field is a flat, rectangular patch of dirt, maybe 6 feet 
wide and 10 feet long (I could be completely mis-estimating this) with 
several (3?) marble-sized holes dug in it, maybe 2 feet apart, in a straight 
line.  The object of the game is to roll your marble into the holes somehow.  
As I said, it's been about 15 years, and I've never run across it since.
I seem to recall something about the marbles being traditionally made by 
placing round pebbles in little potholes under waterfalls and coming back in 
a few years when they were eroded into spheres, but maybe that was something 
else.
A few years ago somebody's choice of word had to do with some card game I'd 
never heard of, but it was for real.  So I thought I'd make up a definition 
based on a real game.
-Fran



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