(The story goes that Rochambeau won, which is why the game is still called Ro-Sham-Bo in some quarters.)"īut Washington, Rochambeau, and Cornwallis did not negotiate surrender terms together in a tent nor did they even meet together on that occasion. "George Washington is reputed to have played it with Cornwallis and the Comte de Rochambeau to decide who would be the last to leave Cornwallis's tent after the signing of the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781. Rochambeau (and Lafayette and other French military officers) were quite eager to come to America to fight with the Americans, and had to resist others' efforts to keep them in France so that their military experience would not be missed there.Īnother mention of the supposed historical connection with Rochambeau is in physicist Len Fisher's Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life (2008): His arrival is widely credited with the introduction of RPS to the United States."īut this is all unlikely. "It is widely believed that an ill-advised throw of Scissors (or Ciseaux) resulted in his being uprooted from his ancestral home to become the marshal of the French forces during the American Revolution. Their Official Rock Paper Scissors Strategy Guide (2004) offers one theory about how the game became "synonymous with" the Comte de Rochambeau: Two American brothers, Douglas and Graham Walker, organized the World RPS Society, with tournaments, a website, t-shirts, and posters, and they have also published a light-hearted guide to playing "professional" rock-paper-scissors, which includes a brief and half-serious history of the game. Over the past decade, rock-paper-scissors has become a quasi-formally organized sport with international tournaments. Next up was to consider the alleged connection with the Comte de Rochambeau, the French general who was a hero of the American Revolution. I wondered whether "Rochambeau" might be an English-language corruption of a French triplet beginning with " roche" (rock), but I have nothing else to offer in this speculative vein, so this is not part of my theory.Ī Historical Connection with Count Rochambeau? It then says that the game is called "Rochambeau" in the United States. But the French-language Wikipedia entry on the game lists the Francophone countries' names for it as: pierre-feuille-ciseaux, papier-caillou-ciseaux, roche-papier-ciseaux, pierre-papier-ciseaux, and feuille-caillou-ciseaux. So that carries the word back at least a couple of decades.Īs an illustration of the severe limits on using Wikipedia for research, the English-language Wikipedia entry on rock-paper-scissors (or rock-scissors-paper, etc.) says that the game is called "Rochambeau" in French. Mathematicians and evolutionary biologists, for example, who have recently become interested in "multivariant" selection systems over the past 20 years or so, have written about rock-paper-scissors and have typically cited the game as "rock-paper-scissors" and then added "Rochambeau" or "Roshambo" in parentheses after it. Nevertheless, more Googling makes it clear that "Rochambeau," used for rock-paper-scissors, has an older and wider provenance. Asking around, however, I discovered that some of my colleagues, raised in various places around the country, had vaguely heard of "Rochambeau," but with some of them I was not able to figure out if they had definitely called the game of rock-paper-scissors "Rochambeau" when they were younger, or whether they had merely watched a certain South Park episode in which Eric Cartman challenged another child to play "Rochambeau," but which he explained as consisting in a kind of duel carried out by kicking each other (Google "Rochambeau" and "South Park" to find a link to the clip, but I hereby give you a "language warning" for this). Clearing Out the Undergrowth of Misinformationįirst, a confession: Although I began playing rock-paper-scissors when I was a child, I had never heard it called "Rochambeau" until you sent in your question.
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