Kick the can (also known as kick the block, guard the block, can can, 40 40, pom pom, tip the can, tin can copper, and can up can down), is an outdoor children's game related to tag, hide and seek, and capture the flag, played with as few as three to as many as several dozen players. The game is one of skill, strategy, stealth, and stamina. Kick the can was very popular among kids during the Great Depression. The game is mentioned in Francisco Jiménez's book The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child.
Play scholar Rodney Carlisle notes that: "As outdoor and unstructured play of children continues to dwindle, the game of Kick the Can is becoming less and less known to each generation... At one point in time, teenagers played Kick the Can with younger children, and the game and its variations were passed on from child to child. Past generations remember this game fondly, and it was enough of a cultural phenomenon that it was a central player in a 1962 episode of The Twilight Zone and was incorporated later in the 1983 film of the same name. It is included in the 2010 PBS documentary New York Street Games.
A tin can telephone is a type of acoustic (non-electrical) speech-transmitting device made up of two tin cans, paper cups or similarly shaped items attached to either end of a taut string or wire. It is a particular case of mechanical telephony, where sound (i.e., vibrations in the air) is converted into vibrations along a liquid or solid medium. These vibrations are transmitted through the medium (string) and then converted back to sound.
Before the invention of the electromagnetic telephone, there were mechanical acoustic devices for transmitting spoken words and music over a greater distance, faster than the speed of sound in air. The very earliest mechanical telephones were based on transmission through pipes or other physical media, and among the very earliest experiments were those conducted by the British physicist and polymath Robert Hooke from 1664 to 1685. From 1664 to 1665 Hooke experimented with sound transmission through a taut distended wire. An acoustic string phone is attributed to him as early as 1667.
The exact origin of the saying ‘[to] open up a can of whoop ass’ is heavily disputed, and most online language resources disagree about when and where this term might first have been used.
Most resources are in agreement that the term began to spread through the internet in the 1990s on message boards (in part due to becoming the catch phrase of the incredibly popular professional wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin), although the term is accepted to have originated some time before this.