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“Eeny, meeny, miny, mo” and the ambiguous history of counting-out rhymes (2015) (theparisreview.org)
53 points by pepys on May 31, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 53 comments



In my childhood neighborhood, we didn't let the tiger go, and we didn't repeat the initial line.

"Eenie, meanie, miney, mo Catch a tiger by his toe If he hollers make him pay fifty dollars ev'ry day"

It wasn't so much to "count", as we counted with the named of numbers. It was applied as a pseudorandom selector, with the assumption that the person counting hadn't thought through the math to the point of knowing which child would be "it" for the next game of tag. Whoever starting counting around the circle first got to point to the "eenie" person, then around the circle. Sometimes this would be followed by another rhyme and there were a few options for that.


Just as a counterpoint to all the anecdotal rebuttals here in the comments with regional variants: growing up in California, the rhyme was as stated in the article, with the opening line reiterated at the end.

I'm in Illinois (and have been since later childhood) and think here in Chicago it is the same as I have never heard any of the variations mentioned here.


I grew up in the 90s in the Chicago suburbs and the rhyme was as you described. The first time I can recall hearing a variation was when I saw Pulp Fiction at 17.

edit: actually, I remember that "my mother said..." one as well, as an occasional ad-libbed variation.


For us it was:

Eenie meenie minie mo / Catch a tiger by his toe / If he hollers, let him go / My mother said to pick the very best one / And you are not it

I wonder if it's a regional difference -- I'm from Arizona.


We did the "my mother" one, and this was an easy spot to cheat if you could think quick enough. In that last phrase, you could put in or omit the "not", thus changing the meaning based on who you liked and where the count was about to fall.


The variations with those kinds of elaborations towards the end always seem more amenable to ad-libbing more or less syllables (like "very", or "are not" versus "aren't") to change the result when you see how it'll turn out.


You could try to play tricks like saying "mom" instead of "mother" or something, but anyone with any sense of rhythm would have noticed it was the wrong number of beats.


I lived in Yuma in 3rd-6th grade, 1993-1996. Depending on who was doing the counting, that was often the exact rhyme. The clever ones among us figured out the pattern, and would switch between "and you are it/not it" as necessary to get our way.

I also remember that there was some combination that extended the rhyme but didn't change the result. When I figured that out, it frustrated me that the other kids would still insist on using it.


Brooklyn, 1970s: Eenie meenie minie mo / Catch a tiger by the toe / If he hollers, let him go / My mother said to pick this one

(with the last line being the most common variant I remember, although I think it was common to strategically append things like 'and you are not it')


Also from Arizona:

Eenie meenie minie mo / Catch a tiger by his toe / If he hollers, make him pay / Fifty dollars ev'ry day / My mom said to pick the very best one / And you are it


The "my mother" one was one of the optional additional selection rhymes. This was in the Mississippi river valley of northeastern Missouri / western Illinois.


I grew up in Georgia and this sounds like what I remember.


Central Illinois: same version


I lived in central Illinois for a few years (well, several if you count west central) but during those years I didn't have much need of playground rhymes. If I remain curious about this, though, I have a number of people I could ask for their anecdotes.

I lived in Quincy, then Springfield, then Quincy again.


That's the variation I remember from my childhood in Miami.


We didn't modify the rhyme like you, but we used it to the same purpose. Each kid would put both fists into the ring. The counter would count with one fist tapping each kid's fist in turn, and when he came to the missing spot (for the fist he's using to count), he'd tap his own chin.

Aside from the one potato two potato mentioned in the article, the only subsequent rhyme that I can recall started out something like Engine engine number nine...


Engine engine number nine, going down Chicago line. If the train should jump the track, do you want your money back? Y-E-S spells yes [N-O spells NO] and you are not it! (1980s, south of Seattle)


Same, but "Racing car number 9, losing petrol all the time, how many miles did he go?" but we didn't put "spuds in" for that, just pointed. The person on "go" would say a number, you'd count on to find the person who was out, it, or whatever.


It seems like a ritualized rhyme for 'random' selection makes more sense than using it for counting, for which ordinary numbers suffice.


Similar one in Croatian, where the entire rhyme consists of nonense words:

    En Ten Tini,
    Sava Raka Tini,
    Sava Raka Tika Taka
    Bija Baja Buf.
It kind of looks related to the English/Welsh "Yan, tan, tethera" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_tan_tethera) mentioned in the article, which is a bit surprising to me since Croatian (and southern-slavic in general) languages haven't borrowed much English words before the second half of 20th century and this is certainly older.


Yan tan tethera is usually postulated to be of Celtic origin (it usually uses "dick" for ten, which is presumably a cognate of the Welsh "deg")

IIRC the celts moved all across Europe, but that pushes the timeframe back by two millennia or so


Deg seems probable to be a mutation of "dec" from the Roman occupation, ie adopted from Latin? Transliterated Cymraeg numbers (in South Wales) go "een, die, tree".

Old Welsh appeared just before the mediaeval period, coming from the common Brythonic tongue(s) AFAIK. There's a lot of Latin, not all recognisable: fenestr, is easy to see; ysbyty (iz-bit-ee, "hospital") less clear due to modification to a supposed origin of "ty" (meaning house).

Interestingly you can find some English words, often again heavily mutated, that no longer exist in English (see eg https://archive.org/stream/englishelementin00parruoft/#page/... don't have my other references handy).

Edit: one other reference that's to hand, https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nWpbDAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA335&o....


> adopted from Latin

Maybe just indo-european in origins? Yes, it looks like 'dec'. See singularity2001's answer.


Don't think that covers it so well. The area we now call Wales was occupied by the Romans at which time the official language of the region was Latin. The Brythonic that was present across [at least Southern, ie below Scotland,] Britain clearly then adopted loanwords. However, it's hard sometimes to see if they were adopted in to the Briton's language, adopted in to English and then in to Cymraeg, or adopted in to English from Norman-French and then in to Cymraeg. The earliest non-fragmentary Cymraeg documents are from a couple of hundred years after the Norman conquest AFAIK.

Clearly it seems naively to be Indo-European, but specifying Latin origin gives a bit more nuance: it could be wrong nuance! I'm afraid I'm not learned enough to know if it's Cymraeg loaned from English via Norman-French from Latin, or if it's direct, or indeed some other more or less tortuous route.


Thing is, it's "dekm" in proto-Indo-European - and for a word that simple and basic, it's likely that it was already well-established as a direct derivative in Celtic before Latin had a chance to influence it. Most other IE languages also inherited it directly - e.g "deka" in Greek, "deset" in Slavic, "dasa" in Sanskrit etc (the s/k difference is satem/centum). It would be weird if Celtic was special.


I'm well out of my depth as I'm sure you can tell, but I think the phrase is porque no los dos?

Sources suggest dekam is Common Brythonic, but that doesn't mean the Old Welsh dec (now deg in Cymraeg) didn't come from Latin?

Wouldn't it be weird if mutation of words in Celtic/Brythonic and Latin happened identically over time. Of course the similarity through earlier common ancestry of counting words would facilitate such a move.

Thanks for your input though, my suggestion was supposed to be tentative as I know there are Latin loan words in Cymraeg from Old Welsh.

Do you know whence comes the support for "dekam" being well-established in Celtic via IE, is it largely based on phonemic evidence?


I don't know the exact etymology of this word in Celtic - just mentioning some other languages with a similar relationship to PIE, but not necessarily with the same degree of influence by Latin, for comparison.

I'm not sure what you mean by "mutation of the words happened identically over time"? The Latin for "ten" is "decem" - it didn't drop the "m" (hence also "decimus", "decimatio" etc). Most Romance languages did drop it eventually - but that came later, and in any case those languages wouldn't be in a position to influence Welsh.

FWIW, I don't think it would be all that surprising for related but diverged languages to evolve in a similar way. Sure, they may have developed some different laws governing those changes since the divergence - but they will also have some common laws from their shared ancestry. And there's "convergent evolution" of languages, as well. Although it would be interesting to find out if this particular change is really governed by some common rule, or some rule that independently arose in two different branches, or it's just a curious coincidence.


dick/deg for 10 is also cognate with french dix, digits(10 fingers), greek Δεκά (decimal...), persian 𐏓 dah 𐎭𐎠 ده, sanskrit dasa १०...


As kids in Mumbai we had this Hindi rhyme

  Adha padha, kaun padha   # half a fart, who farted
  mamaji ka gohda padha    # uncle's horse farted      
  Doom, Doom, Puss.        # farting sounds


We said: "eeny, meany, miny, mo; catch a nigger by his (its?) toe; if it squeals let it go; eeny, meany, miny, mo" sometimes adding things like "O, U, T, spells out".

FWIW I had no idea "nigger" could refer to a person and certainly didn't use it in that way. But then no non-Europeans lived in our British village.

For some reason I recollect thinking it was about catching stickleback. Maybe the only thing I could conceive catching by its 'toe' (ie end), as you have to avoid the spines when catching them down in the sluice.

Having kids now, I find it interesting that at a disparate area of the UK they have very similar rhymes, but with notable differences.


I made the same assumption about "nigger", that it was some kind of fish that could be caught. We did have several races in my class, but I wasn't aware of it.

But this was most popular at my primary school:

  Ip dip, dog shit 
  Fucking bastard, dirty git
  You are not it
There was a clean version, "ip dip sky blue...", we only used it if an adult was listening. I've forgotten the rest.

Also:

  There's a party on the hill, can you come?
  Bring your own bread and butter and a bun.
  Who is your best friend? [child says a name]
  T H O M A S
  You are out!
And

  Ippy dippy dation
  My operation 
  How many buses 
  In a London station? 
  [child gives number]
  1 2 3 4 5
  You are out.
For both of these, some quick arithmetic could ensure I was selected, amid accusations that this wasn't fair.


  There’s a party on the hill, would you like to come? (Yes.)
  Then bring a bottle of rum-tum-tum. (Can’t afford it.)
  Then pack your bags and get lost.
Most couldn’t cope if you deviated from the script in your responses, but if the nominated child could apparently afford the bottle of rum-tum-tum it might go on to a bag of silver and increasingly obscure items. But mostly the counter would just tell you to pack your bags and get lost whatever you said.


Oh, had forgotten "ip dip" which we called as "ip, dip, dog shit" but definitely with a different second line, same last line. I recall the 'naughty boy' teaching it to us, it wasn't common aside from that.

I've heard as an adult "Ip, dip, sky blue; nanny sitting on the loo; dropping bombs, singing songs; out goes you".


I’ve had this for a few years:

  Eeny, meeny, miny, mo
  Is deterministic, so—
I still need to write the last two lines. Ideally “stochastic” will make its way in there; it can fit the metre.


How about

Eeny, meeny, miny, mo

Is deterministic, so

To make the outcome more elastic

Let's try a rhyme that's more stochastic

(Optimally, the speaker would add a variable number of nonsense syllables in the last line. "Let's try a rhyme lalalalalalala that's more stochastic".)


Lose "Let's" - better scansion.


Eeny, meeny, miney, mo,

Is deterministic, so

Make the outcome more elastic

With a rhyme that's more stochastic.

(You're welcome.)


What's about the Denmark Zimbabwe connection?

Denmark:

    Ene, mene, ming, mang,
    Kling klang,
    Osse bosse bakke disse,
    Eje, veje, vaek.
And Zimbabwe:

    Eena, meena, ming, mong,
    Ting, tay, tong,
    Ooza, vooza, voka, tooza,
    Vis, vos, vay.


Here is the 1859 version of kids arguing over the right rhyme: https://books.google.com/books?id=T80XAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA254

Or, if that does n't suit, then take

'Eeny, meeny, mony mite;

Pesskalana, bona, strike;

Parago, walk.'"

"Pooh!" said Frank; "that aint right, nor anywhere near it. This is the way I learned that one:--

Eeny, meeny, mony, my;

Pistolanee, bony, sly;

Argy, dargy, walk.

The other boys all objected to this version of the saying, but Frank insisted that if it was not the right one, it was certainly the best.

The oldest versions google books records reached print in 1855: https://books.google.com/books?id=v4IkAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA120

"Eeny, meeny, moany, mite,

Butter, lather, boney, strike,

Hair, bit, frost neck,

Harrico, barrico, we, wo, wack."

and

"Eeny, meeny, tipty, te,

Teena, Dinah, Domine,

Hocca, proach, Domma, noach,

Hi, pon, tus."

By 1888 there was a whole book on the topic, and the modern (pre-tiger) version had taken hold: https://books.google.com/books?id=uH8MAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA46

Apparently the doggerel which is the favourite among American children to-day is the senseless jingle:

Eeny, meeny, miny, mo,

Catch a nigger by the toe!

If he hollers let him go!

Eeny, meeny, miny, mo.


And here’s a French one:

    Am, stram, gram,
    Pic et pic et colégram,
    Bour et bour et ratatam,
    Am, stram, gram.
I could definitely see myself getting lost down the rabbit-hole trying to find out the origins of these things.


Did the ancient oracles use hexagrams or just tripods?


Possibly related:

Ein Menetekel (Bible) [0] מנא מנא תקל ופרסין MENE, MENE, TEKEL, PARSIN <> Aen Taen Tethera Peddera

Ene Mene miste, es rappelt in der Kiste. Ene Mene Meck Und Du bist weg. Ene Mene Mu und dran bist Du (German)

Enenene maskim gul-a-meš [1](Sumerian adjuration / invocation / conjuration / evocation / incantation ? )

Sumerian numbers AŠ (1) 𒀸 MIN (2) 𒋰 *EŠ (3) 𒀼

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menetekel "The writing on the wall" [1] DELITZSCH Grundzüge der Sumerischen Grammatik


I remember in primary school in the 80's all the kids were actually using "nigger". I went along with it, I didn't know what a nigger was.

I was in north Brisbane, Australia.


Down here in Melbourne in the 90's, we used Tigger, as in the character from Winnie the Pooh. It seems like a fair mid-point between the two most common variants of this rhyme.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigger


In New Zealand we used 'piggie'. None of us were aware that this was not the original. Mercifully.


Here in Chicagoland in the 80's we had the Eenie meanie of the article, but also this variant:

Eenie, meanie, hippa-teeny A la la-la booba-leenie Atchie, katchie, booba-latchie Out goes you

Then a whole slew of other rhymes used for picking 'it' in a game of tag, hide and seek, scatter beans, kick the can, etc.


I never heard that variant but I just read it to my kids and as soon as I got to "atchie katchi" my 16 y/o daughter shot up and grabbed her 14 y/o brother and the two of them broke into a paddy-cake like routine to this:

eeny meeny sesalini ooh ah tumbolini achi achi liberachi i love you

take a peach take a plumb take a sip of bubble gum no peach no plumb no sip of bubble gum

saw you with your boyfriend last night how did you know i peeked through the window nosy didn’t take a bath dirty stepped on a baby must be crazy that’s why they call me

eeny meeny sesalini ooh a tumbolini achi achi liberachi i love you


Exists in Italian too, although the wikipedia article cites research perhaps linking it to something in Latin:

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambarab%C3%A0_cicc%C3%AC_cocc%...

    « Ambarabà ciccì coccò
    tre civette/galline/scimmiette sul comò
    che facevano l'amore
    con la figlia del dottore;
    il dottore si ammalò:
    ambarabà ciccì coccò! »
The text is a bit more risque than in English. "ambarabà ciccì coccò" is the nonsense part.

    three little owls (civette) on the dresser 
    that were making love
    to the doctor's daughter
    the doctor got sick


This is great! I don't know any Italian, but that won't stop me from hazarding a guess that the word cocco perhaps may be derived from coco, which in turn reminded me of a translation given in Hofstadter's Le Ton Beau de Marot (p 52b). Here it is:

  Mia coco,
  Io ti do
  Il buondi; 
  Stare qui
  Ti fa mal.
  L’ospedal
  Lascerai: 
  Aprirai
  II porton. 
  Con passion
  Fuggirai 
  Dai tuoi guai: 
  Stando a me,
  Cosi e. 
  Non poltrir! 
  E perir
  L'indugiar!
  Va’a mangiar
  Un boccon
  Di bonbon.
  Se ristai, 
  Smagrirai
  Di pallor
  E languor.
  O Gesu, 
  Pensa Tu
  Al suo pro. 
  Mia coco!


This counting-out game is known as the Josephus Problem, and dates back many centuries. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_problem. I have a wood-block printed Japanese textbook from around 1700 with a good account of the problem.


Lexicon Valley did a great podcast on this subject.

http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2016/0...


As with many others, "Eeny, meeny ..." was for selection. I remember using the School House Rock lyrics/rhyme for counting by 5 for counting (Who's not ready, holler I) during "Hide and Seek".


Interesting we said nigger but we're told to use possum cause that was a bad word.

Always assumed it was a localisation but it seems also multicountry.




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