The Ollie Ollie Oxen Will Never Be Free: Learning to Live with COVID-19

Nobody is quite sure where we got the curious phrase “ollie, ollie oxen free” — which children have used for centuries to indicate that the game of hide-and-seek is over and it is now safe to come out. It might be a corruption of some German phrase like alle, alle auch sind frei which means something like, “everyone is also free.” Or maybe it just goes back to…