schoolyard heritage

Casper has started to bring home some schoolyard rhymes - stuff I remember knowing and using as a child, but that we never say at home, so she's clearly learned it at school. The big example is Eenie, meenie, minie, mo (wikipedia is interesting and I think fairly well-documented on the topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eeny,_meeny,_miny,_moe).

I (b. 1972) learned the "catch a tiger" version, and that is what Casper has learned too. I didn't realized there had been a racist version (using the n-word where I have tiger) in the US prior to the 1960s until I read about it in a children's book when I was about 10 (in the book, a child notes that it used to be said that way but now they realized it was wrong.)

It's fascinating to me that my kid learned this rhyme from other kids on the playground, and I'd bet that most of the time these things are passed down by the children - it's not like anybody's mom sits them down in kindergarten and says, "Okay! I's time to learn counting-out rhymes!" So, since "eenie meenie" is documented as far back as 1815, and in close to its present form in 1850, that's many, many generations of schoolkids passing it along.

(I did teach her Miss Mary Mack, but she's picked up a hand-clap rhyme I don't know.)