Playing Cards? You Got That Right!

not because of birthdays. I'm just I don't know, I'm 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 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 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 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, 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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. 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. 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 Yoker right after this. Okay, Chuck, you really teased it up. 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 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 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 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, 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,

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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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.

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, 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 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,

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 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, 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

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. 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, 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, 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

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 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 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 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. 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,

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 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. 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

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