But it's really hard to - and the history of it is much more complicated than that because the sounds in this rhyme are really sticky. And that then caused a lot of entomologists to do kind of back formations, and say, well, because it had this racial slur, we think it may have had all of these other, you know, African American origins and all of this stuff with it. RAPHEL: An earlier version of the rhyme that children recited on playgrounds did include a racial slur sometimes. Walk us through the journey of this rhyme. I understand that one of the earlier versions of the rhyme included a racial slur. MARTIN: So how did it morph? I mean, there've been several iterations of this since, over these many, many hundreds of years. And it sounded a little like this.ĪDRIENNE RAPHEL: Yan, tan, tehtera, methera, pimp, sethera, lethera, hovera, dovera - so you can kind of hear the eeny meeny miny mo in it, right? And she says you can trace the rhyme's origin way back to when shepherds used it to count hundreds of years ago.
Raphel wrote about eeny meeny miny mo for The Paris Review. But where does it come from?Īdrienne Raphel is a poet and PhD student in English at Harvard University. MARTIN: Every kid seems to know this rhyme, or at least a variation of it, including the kids you just heard - 11-year-old Cecilia Clemens and Anna Kulbashny, 10-year-old Emile Beaubien and Sarayu Mudiya, age 6. You could rock, paper, scissors for it, or you could do the following.ĪNNA KULBASHNY. This entry was posted in Folk speech, Game, general and tagged child, children's rhymes, counting out, rhymes on Apby Amelia Getahun.You're playing a game, and it's time to figure out who goes first. Rankin, Counting-out Rhymes: a Dictionary (University of Texas Press, 1980)). For example, during World War II, children in Atlanta recited this version of the rhyme: “Eenie, meenie, minie, moe/Catch the emperor by his toe/If he hollers make him say:/’I surrender to the USA.'” There have also been racist variations of this rhyme using the n-word that appeared in the mid- to late-1800s, around the time of the Civil War.įor more versions of this rhyme, see “Counting-out Rhymes: A Dictionary” by R. After doing some research, I found that different versions of the rhyme have arisen over time, each of them reflecting the specific time period during which they were invented. Because this rhyme exists in the United Kingdom as well as in other English-speaking countries, I thought it was interesting that this version specifically referenced the colors of the American flag.
The “red, white, and blue” part of the rhyme was particularly interesting to me, because it made this version specific to the U.S. The fact that this rhyme has been so widespread and also has so many different versions demonstrates the “multiplicity and variation” of folklore as laid out by Dundes. Though these were not the lyrics I remember from when I was younger, I recited a version of this rhyme when I was growing up, and almost everyone I know also knows this rhyme. This was particularly interesting to me, because this is a rhyme that is fairly universal in children’s lore. “Eenie Meenie Miney Moe/catch a tiger by the toe/if he hollers make him pay/fifty dollars every day/red, white, and blue/I choose you.” Though she could not remember where she first heard it, she believes it was from other kids at school when she was younger. I asked her about what rhymes she knew, and she shared this one with me.
The informant is my 9-year-old cousin, who lives in Buena Park, California.
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