Eenie meenie miney mo walking dead shirt
Eeny Meeny traces its ancestry to an ancient British counting system: the Anglo-Cymric Score. The Saõ Tomenese phrase ine mina mana mu, meaning “my sister’s children,” bears a very close phonological resemblance to “Eeny, meeny, miny, mo.” The original “Catch a nigger by the toe,” according to Bickerton, points to the rhyme’s roots in an African American community.īut there may be an answer when we search for sound instead of sense. In 1982, similarly, Derek Bickerton postulated that the rhyme derives from Saõ Tomenese, a Creole language spoken by African slaves. And yet, as his contemporary Henry Carrington Bolton pointed out, Ker’s argument is akin to deriving the word Middletown from Moses: “By dropping ‘oses’ we have the root ‘M,’ and on adding ‘iddletown’ we have ‘Middletown.’ ” In the nineteenth century, for instance, the historian John Bellender Ker strung together several arbitrary strings of Dutch words that sounded like English counting-out rhymes, claiming these ditties originated as corruptions of stupid Dutch. These prehistories range from charmingly whimsical to patently bogus. And several folklorists have proposed various etymologies based on the content of some versions of Eeny Meeny, trying to derive significance from some variation of the gibberish. The shared genetics of all these counting-out ditties strongly imply an ür-Eeny Meeny. “Irel pirel” to “easel diesel” is easy to figure out: When you say a set of phrases over and over, the ends and beginnings blend into each other, as when “Work it work it work it work it” becomes “twerk.” So Scottish kids in the fifties, used to hearing “diesel” elsewhere, heard it for “pirel” here.
(“Hobson-Jobson” is an Anglo-Indian corruption of the Muslim festival cry “Yā Ḥasan! Yā Ḥosain!” “punch,” originally meaning a drink with five ingredients, is a Hobson-Jobson of panj, meaning “five.”īut at their core, counting-out rhymes tend to be very conservative. Other Eeny Meeny varietals arose through the process of Hobson-Jobson, that is, when words from another language are homophonically translated to fit the phonology of the native speaker’s tongue.
Some are mondegreens, a term coined by the author Sylvia Wright when she heard “And laid him on the green” as “And Lady Mondegreen.” (“ ’Scuse me while I kiss this guy” is a mondegreen for Jimi Hendrix’s lyric “ ’Scuse me while I kiss the sky”, and Taylor Swift’s long list of ex-lovers are lonely Starbucks lovers.) Many variations of Eeny Meeny have cropped up through mishearing, the way a game of Telephone or Chinese Whispers retains the sound of the original but mangles the sense. The rhyme morphs constantly, but usually ad hoc, and each kickball court has its own particular flavor based more on random chance one child’s popular improvisation might catch on and change the rhyme in a certain region for decades. If it doesn’t seem to make sense, even in the gibberish Eeny Meeny world, that you’d grab a carnivorous cat’s toe and expect the tiger to do the hollering, remember that in both England and America, children until recently said “Catch a nigger by the toe.” The nigger-to-tiger shift is one of the rare instances where changes in the rhyme happen in such an explicit and pointed fashion. In the canonical Eeny Meeny, “tiger” is standard in the second line, but this is a relatively recent revision.
And I’d be remiss in omitting “One potato, two potato, three potato, four / Five potato, six potato, seven potato, more,” which flirts with replacing eeny meeny as the counting-out gold standard in the United States. “Ippetty, sipetty, ippetty sap, ipetty, sipetty, kinella kinack” (Scotland). “Eenty, teenty, ithery, bithery” (England). “Hinty, minty, cuty, corn, wire, briar, limber lock” (United States). Not only are there hoards of Eeny Meenies, there are just as many counting-out schemes that share the same DNA. In the fifties and sixties, the formidable husband-and-wife folklorists Iona and Peter Opie recorded hundreds of varieties in England and America, including, to name just a few: What we do know is that once Eeny Meeny appeared on the scene, it was everywhere. But where did eeny meeny come from? Kipling tells us that “Eenee, Meenee, Mainee, and Mo / Were the First Big Four of the Long Ago,” but that’s not such a good lead.
It turns up in strange places: in Pulp Fiction, in the Great Vermont Corn Maze, in Justin Bieber songs. No one knows what eeny or meeny might mean everybody knows what “eeny meeny” means. “Eeny meeny miny mo” is one of those rhymes that’s ingrained in our cultural limbic system-once we hear the first two syllables, the rest unspools whether we want it to or not. A Works Progress Administration poster for the Cedar Central Apartments in Cleveland, Ohio, ca.