Abe Lincoln was a Good Old Man

Here's one sent in by Jason from Maryland, who learned it in the early 80s:

Abe Lincoln was a good old man
jumped out the window with his dick in his hand
said "scuse me, ladies, gotta do my duty
drop your drawers and give me some booty."

This seems to have spread around a lot - throwing Abe Lincoln into a rhyme almost always makes it funnier.

Some other similar Lincoln rhymes I've seen go

Abe Lincoln was a good old man
washed his face in a frying pan

and

Abe Lincoln was a good old soul
washed his face in a toilet bowl

I wouldn't presume to guess how old this is; folklorists probably would have left it out of their books up until the 1960s (before then, even Iona Opie, who was no prude, was referring to "unprintable" rhymes). But all of these rhymes sound like variations (in some cases changing only the name) of "Old Dan Tucker," one of the solid gold top hit songs of the 1830s:

Old Dan Tucker was a good old man
washed his face in a frying pan
combed his hair with a wagon wheel
born with a toothache in his heel


Bruce Springsteen recorded a rollicking, spirited version of the song on his wonderful We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions album. I assume that there were dirty verses going around by, say, the 1840s, though the word "booty" as a synonym for sex only goes back to about the 1920s. When Abe Lincoln started turning up in the song is probably anyone's guess; the idea probably came to some kid who heard the song at camp and spread from there. I would say that by the 1980s, most of the kids singing the lines above had never heard "Old Dan Tucker."

Which versions did you hear, and when?

My Boyfriend Gave Me an Apple

I didn't know this one, but it seems to have been fairly popular in the US, the UK and Australia:

My boyfriend gave me an apple
my boyfriend gave me a pear
my boyfriend gave me a kiss on the lips
and threw me down the stairs

I gave him back his apple
I gave him back his pear
I gave him back his kiss on the lips
and threw HIM down the stairs



There are several third verses, mostly involving going to the movies (since all this stair-throwing didn't end the relationship):

He took me to the movies
to buy some bubble gum
and when he wasn't looking
I stuck it up his bum

Then there are (almost inevitably) underwear variations:

I threw him over London
I threw him over France
I threw him over Harbour bride
he lost his underpants

(This is often followed by a verse where he flies all over London, France, and Harbour Bridge (or the USA or any number of other "third" places) to find his underpants.

Folks, this is one messed-up relationship. Some folklorists say this is about girl empowerment, but I'm not really buying it. This is a couple that throws each other down the stairs then goes to the movies to engage in all kinds of deviant acts - it's either a real BDSM power couple or a seriously dysfunctional couple with no one I can really sympathize with (something tells me that that initial stair-throwing wasn't the first act of violence in the relationship).

But all analysis aside, how old is this? It's been appearing in print since the 1980s, but almost certainly goes back further than that. In fact, we can probably connect it to a couple of old, old folk songs.

The first of these is "I gave my love a cherry, it had no stone." "My boyfriend gave me an apple" sort of follows the pattern of that one (and is considerably less boring).

But a more obvious, and far more likely, thing would be to connect it to the old Irish standard "Do You Love An Apple"

Do you love an apple?
Do you love a pear?
Do you love a laddie
with curly brown hair?
Yes, I love him
and can't deny him
I will follow
wherever he goes

This is essentially the same song without the violence - the playground version sort of follows the song to a natural conclusion of what might happen if you promise to follow a laddie wherever he goes (ie, he could turn out to be a real jerk).

It's possible that "my boyfriend gave me an apple" had its genesis at some camp where one of those folk songs was sung around the camp fire (there's a scene in the still-not-on-DVD movie Little Darlings where a counselor bores the campers to tears with "I Gave My Love a Cherry") (it also showed up on Doctor Who Season 2, if you're keeping score). Did anyone hear this before the mid 80s? And where did you hear it?

Bang Bang You're Dead

There were two variations of this chant at my school:

Bang Bang you're dead
brush your teeth and go to bed

and

Bang Bang you're dead
fifty bullets in your head

Googling around shows that both (or a combination of the two) are fairly well known, though I can't quite find anything that might indicate how far back they go. I can't find either of them in print, though "bang bang you're dead" by itself was a common cry by the middle of the 20th century in war games all over the country. No telling where the rest of it came from, though I imagine that it's been around a while.

There are plenty of variations after the "fifty bullets" line, including "some are red, some are blue / some are made of chicken poo" and "another one / up your bum"

Where and when did YOU hear this one?

Sipping Cider Through a Straw

Here's an interesting one with quite a pedigree. I THINK the tune is the same as The Princess Pat and The Other Day I Met A Bear. It's often sung in call-and-response form.

The cutest boy
I ever saw
was sipping ci-
der through a straw
I asked him if
he'd teach me how
to sip some ci-
der through a straw
he said of course
he'd teach me how
to sip some ci-
der through a straw
so cheek to cheeck
and jaw to jaw
we both sipped ci-
der through a straw
that's how I got
my mother-in-law
and forty-nine kids
who call me 'ma.'

The origin of the song is a bit fuzzy. It (or one of the same title) was copyrighted in 1919, but seems to be older than that (the first line, with genders reversed, has been appearing in print since at least 1905, and in the 1920s Carl Sandburg published it in "AMerican Songbag," indicating that he'd learned it from adults who had learned it as kids). It seems to have originally been published as a jazz/parlor song. I haven't dug up many early versions, though I think the genders were usually reversed in the parlor song days, making it a warning to guys not to let the cutest girl you ever saw get too close.

A lot changes in the song when you just change the genders around, which is how the song caught on in camps and schools and playgrounds. Many variations go around. Sometimes their jaw will slip, so they're sipping cider lip-to-lip. In some it turns out that the cider was really beer, making the guy into some kind of date rapist.

But it's certainly evolved into part of the grand tradition of "Never Trust Guys" songs that goes back centuries. Nowadays a warning against sharing a drink with a boy seems charmingly prudish, but I suppose you can also take it as a warning for girls not to be The Fruit Cup Girl (the girl found in every cafeteria who tries to get her crush's attention by pathetically pretending she needs help opening her fruit cup).

At least this one ends somewhat humorously. If you go back to the old folk songs like "Banks of the Ohio," "Pretty Polly," "Naomi Wise," and all of those, there are plenty where the consequence of trusting guys is being led out into the woods to be murdered.

Kay Shapero collected several variations:
Contributed by Elspeth Naime:

The cutest boy
I ever saw
Was sipping ci-
Der through a straw

I asked him if
He'd show me how
To sip some ci-
Der through a straw (*)

First cheek to cheek
Then hip to hip
Soon we were si-
Pping lip to lip

That's how I got
My mother-in-law
And twenty-nine kids
Who call me "Ma"

The moral of
The story is
Don't sip your ci-
Der through a straw (*)

The verses marked with (*) obviously don't QUITE fit the pattern -- but they are "right" in so far as that's how I've always heard them. Whatever the original might have been, I think it's already been 'filked' by generations of kids... !

Alternate ending
Contributed by Kay Shapero

"The moral of
this story is
We don't sip ci-
der, we sip fizz
The moral of
this story is
We don't sip ci-
der we sip (stop singing, go to chanting LOUDLY)
Good Old Fashioned Root Beer!
Same Old Stuff As Last Year!
Going On Its Fifth Year!
Don't you wish we'd stop here!"
(at this point everyone else around would yell YES!)

And I've also heard it as:

The moral is
You little dopes
We don't sip ci-
der we sip Cokes.
The moral is you little dears
We don't sip cider we sip --

Followed by the Good Old Fashioned Root Beer chant as above.

From Ziza:

The cutest boy
I ever saw
Was sipping spi-
Ders through a skull

From Laura Ross:

The cutest boy (The cutest boy)
I ever saw (I ever saw)
Was sipping ci- (Was sipping ci-)
Der through a straw (Der through a straw)
The cutest boy I ever sa-a-aw
Was sipping cider through a stra-a-aw

I asked him if (I asked him if)
He'd show me how (He'd show me how)
To sip some ci- (To sip some ci-)
Der through a straw (Der through a straw)
I asked him if he'd show me ho-o-ow
To sip some cider through a stra-a-aw

He said of course (He said of course)
He'd show me how (He'd show me how)
To sip some ci- (to sip some ci-)
der through a straw (Der through a straw)
He said of course he'd show me ho-o-ow
To sip some cider through a stra-a-aw

So cheek to cheek (So cheek to cheek)
And jaw to jaw (And jaw to jaw)
We sipped that ci- (We sipped that ci-)
Der through a straw (Der through a straw)
So cheek to cheek and jaw to ja-a-aw
We sipped that cider through a stra-a-aw

And now and then (And now and then)
That straw would slip (That straw would slip)
And we'd sip ci- (And we'd sip ci-)
Der lip to lip (Der lip to lip)
And now and then that straw would sli-i-ip
And we'd slip cider lip to li-i-ip

And now I have (And now I have)
A mother-in-law (A mother-in-law)
And forty-eight kids (And forty-eight kids)
All call me Ma (All call me Ma)
And now I have a mother-in-la-a-aw
And forty-eight kids all call me Ma-a-a

The moral of (The moral of)
This story is (This story is)
When you sip ci- (when you sip ci-)
Der, you sip beer (Der, you sip beer)
The moral of this story i-i-is
When you sip cider, you sip bee-ee-eer

Drink milk!

On Cooties

Perhaps the best known of all playground customs is the game of "cooties."

In its purest form, one kid is said to bear a microscopic bug-based ailment known as "cooties," which is spread by touching others. That's really the whole game - one kid is said to have cooties, and said kid spreads it around to kids who don't protect themselves. To claim that someone has cooties can be a harmless opening for a game, or a genuine taunt designed to keep others away from someone.

Protection against cooties often takes the form of "cootie shots," such as the famous "circle circle dot dot, now you have the cootie shot" drawn on one's arm, though countless variations exist. In other schools, kids have been known to write C.P. (Cootie Protection) on their hands or sneakers. When cooties are passed on to someone who isn't protected, the spreader may state "no give backs" or something along those lines. Some schools have kids designated as "Cootie Queens."

The Knapps' book (see the sidebar on the right) states that it became popular after World War I, which lines it up to the time when people outside of medical communities first became aware of the idea of "germs." As is so often the case, "cooties" seems to have have started with the military. Throughout World War 1, soldiers referred to lice as "cooties." They even turned up in trench songs, such as this one. The "cooties" were a constant problem for soldiers, due in part to the inadequate bathing facilities in the trenches and all of the dead bodies lying around. I really can't think of anything more depressing that being a World War I soldier, except perhaps for being a World War I vet looking back at the hell that was the war and wondering what it all accomplished. Well, it DID bring about a popular playground game.

Some interesting soldier slang about cooties:
Cootie Cage - bunk area
Cootie Garage - hair
Cootie Carnival - hunting shirts for lice

That the term was growing to be applied to undesirable people is evidence by the flapper slang term of the next decade, "cuddle cootie," which meant "one who's idea of a good date is to take girls for a ride on the bus." Par-tay! (see The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History for more flapper slang!) This is one of those things that can't exactly be proven, but it's to be assumed that kids hearing their veteran fathers talk about "cooties" probably gave this game its jump start, and "cooties" went from being a very real ailment involving tiny bugs to a fake ailment involving tinier ones.

At my school, we knew the IDEA of cooties, and a few of the shots and protections, just from pop culture, though I remember wondering what the heck Sheila Tubman was talking about when she said "Peter's got the cooties" in Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing in first grade. We had the same game, but we always called them "germs" instead of "cooties." If Marissa sneezed, you could bet someone was going to touch your arm and say "Sneezy Marissa germs. No returns." Same concept, different name. The only real difference is that kids generally know (at least deep down) that cooties aren't "real," but germs are.

Certainly this is only one variation - the same sort of game has existed all over the world for some time. There's no mention of "Cooties" in Opie's LANGUAGE AND LORE OF SCHOOLCHILDREN, the great study of UK kids in the 50s, but it's awfully similar to "kiss chase," which was exactly what it sounds like (if you didn't want to be kissed, you could invoke protection by saying "eksies.")

What names and rules for cooties did YOU have? Did similar games pre-date the great wars on playgrounds? The game it came to be played was probably widely influenced by the germ theory of disease, but I imagine that variations on the game (perhaps racially based ones) might pre-date that.

Weighing in on the game and ailment, here's urban fantasist and disease enthusiast Seanan McGuire:
The interesting thing about the game of cooties is that it encourages the idea that the way to be "cured" (IE, freed of the infection) is to pass the cooties to another victim. Quarantine and medical treatment are not the answer. This fits the rise of the game as following the reduction of many endemic childhood diseases, since measles are less fun to play games about when you've had them, and encourages a general disregard for quarantine procedures.

The behavior of the cooties themselves supports cooties-as-parasites, rather than cooties-as-virus. (If you don't believe that parasites can, and will, modify the behavior of their hosts...you're probably happier that way.) Cooties are clearly a type of small parasitic fluke or arachnid which prefer to live on schoolchildren, possibly due to using library paste as a reservoir for their eggs, and which encourage their hosts to touch others while announcing infection, thus leading to panic and a further spread of the cootie population.

More 19th Century Fart Jokes (and some from the 18th!)

Again, folklorists generally ignored fart rhymes and other "naughty" ones up until about the 1970s. Even Iona Opie was referring to "unprintable rhymes" in the 1950s. But it can generally be assumed that any time you find a counting-out rhyme about a stink, that rhyme was also used when someone farted.

Here's one from The Counting Out Rhymes of Children, an 1888 tome by a guy named Henry Carrington Bolton (with a name like that, he just about HAD to be a 19th century scholar):

Ink, pink, a penny a wink
Oh, how do you stink!
-- (Ontario, Canada)

Another one goes back even further - Mary Cooper recorded it in Tom Thumb's Pretty Song Book, the very oldest surviving collection of nursery rhymes, which she published in 1744

Little robin redbreast sat on a pole
niddle noddle went his head, poop went his hole

Eventually people cleaned up the last line - it was later published as "wiggle waggle went his tail," which, of course, doesn't even rhyme. Lame. Incidentally, the "poop" here means "fart." When the word "poop" first appeared in America, it meant "butt." In 1640, a guy named Ned Ward wrote a sentence that went "while he manages his whiffle staff with one hand, he scratches his poop with the other." But a 1714 dictionary actually defined the word "poop" as "to break wind backwards." It didn't start being used in its modern sense until around 1900 (according to the book on the left).

Another rhyme in the same 1744 collection:

Piss a bed, piss a bed,
barley butt
your bum is so heavy
you can't get up.

This later turned up in Joyce's Ulysses.. "Piss" meant the same thing then as it does now - in fact, it's one of the older words in the English language. People starting saying the first initial, "pee" (I suppose we should spell it "p---" ) when "piss" started to be considered impolite. Even the cleaned-up versions of the rhymes are pretty well out of circulation now, as far as I can tell, but the 1700s were not a terribly prudish time.

My favorite trick question

A trick question that went around on my playground (and has been showing up in books of childrens' folklore since the 1970s), is not so much a trick question as a regular riddle. It just happens to be slightly risque:

What word starts with an F and ends in U C K?

Answer: "firetruck"

No way to tell how far this goes back, but it appears in print as early as the 60s. I'd guess that it became popular in the 50s; usage of (and jokes revolving around) the infamous f word took off a lot around the late 40s/early 50s.

Like so many other things on this site, the growth of the word probably has roots in the military Using that word as an adjective, noun, etc wasn't new in the 1940s, either, but a lot of the ways we use it now became much more common and widespread due to use by soldiers in World War 2, who were often noted for being very creative with that particular word. World War 1 soldiers were no slouches with it, either, but the big hit word of that war was "bloody," which had previously been used mainly by the lower classes but seeped its way into all walks of society after the war. Having had the door opened for them by the previous generation, it was World War 2 that helped the f bomb come into its own. In fact, you might say that they didn't just liberate Europe, they also liberated the F word. They truly were the greatest generation!

But I digress. Anyway, there's no way to know how old the firetruck joke was by the time is started appearing in print, but I'd say it goes at least back to the 1950s, and possibly as far back as the firetruck itself. See the book to the left of the text above for more on the history of swearing.

Little Miss Muffet parodies

One that's turned up in just about every modern collection of children's folklore:

Little Miss Muffet
sat on a tuffet
eating some curds and whey.
Along came a spider
and sat down beside her
and said "What's in the bowl, bitch?"

This actually seems to be one of the more widespread "rhymes," (though I guess it's more properly a joke than a rhyme). It appears in print as early as 1962; it may go further back than that, but it's tough to tell. Prior to about the 1970s, folklorists were still reluctant to print rhymes with actual curse words. It's generally to be assumed that rhymes have usually been around for a while by the time they get published in a folklore journal, though. Josepha Sherman collected it from a guy named Hank who had learned it in Kentucky in 1958-59 (see her book in the sidebar on the right).

Kids repeating this would surely find it an easy way to get a laugh - kids will generally laugh at anything with a swear word in it, especially in elementary school - but someone who REALLY knows how to tell it can make it absolutely hilarious - it's a matter of A: timing and B: the delivery of the last line. I suspect it might have started out as a nightclub routine by some standup comic (as opposed to a comedian: a comedian says funny things, and a comic says things funny. This is a joke for a comic.)

A similar joke:

Simple Simon met a pieman
going to the fair
said simple simon to the pieman
"what have you got there?"
The pieman said to simple simon
"Pies, dumbass."


Another one Sherman collected came from Ohio, 1963:

Little Miss Muffet
sat on a tuffet
eating some curds and whey.
Along came a spider
and sat down beside her
and she ate that, too.

Lizzie Borden Took An Axe

Ask anyone on the street what Lizzie Borden did, and they'll probably recite the rhyme:

Lizzie Borden took an axe
gave her mother forty whacks
when she saw what she had done
gave her father forty-one

In 1892, Lizzie Borden's parents were found hacked to death in their home. The rhyme fudges details a bit, as one might expect: the murders were committed with a hatched, neither received quite that many whacks, and Borden herself may not have done it at all! In fact, the jury acquitted her in about an hour and a half. No murder weapon was found. But historians remain divided over whether she was really the killer or not to this day. The "real" killer was never found. See the wiki for more

As to the rhyme itself, it's sometimes said that it was written by a newspaperman at the time of the 1893 trial. I can't find the rhyme in any paper from before the 1920s, or in print at all before 1907, but I wouldn't doubt that it's from the trial era. Some also say that Theodore Roosevelt got a real kick out of the rhyme, though no one seems to have a good source on that (besides the fact that he appointed William Moody, one of the prosecutors in the trial, to the office of Attorney General).

The Princess Pat

Here's one I learned (including some hand motions) in 1991 or 92 from a kid in Omaha who had learned it in camp. Made for two singers, the second of which could be a group: One singer would sing a line, and a second would repeat it:

The Princess Pat
lived in a tree.
She sailed across
the Bering sea.
She sailed across
the Channel Two*
and took with her
a ricky-dan-doo!

(chorus)
A ricky dan do.
Now what is that?
It's something made
by the Princess Pat**
It's red and gold
and purple, too
that's why it's called
A ricky dan do!

Now Captain Jack
had a might fine crew
he sailed across
the Channel Two
But his ship sank
and yours will too
unless you take
a ricky dan do!

(repeat chorus)

* - I know this was "Channel Two," not "channel, too," because two fingers were held up
** - sung in high pitched voice

As it turns out, this was actually a much-watered down version of an army song about Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, which is still an active regiment, named for Princess Patricia of Connaught (click link for a picture of the actual Princess Pat!). The regimental colors, designed by the Princess herself, were known as the Ric-a-Dam-Doo, which is apparently Gaelic for "Cloth of thy mother." There's a picture of one here - it is, in fact, red and gold and purple, too.

I almost didn't believe it when I heard about the origins of the song - it sounds like one of those stories you hear about "Humpty Dumpty" being about Richard the Third that turn out to have no basis in fact, other than that it "sounds about right" (see also: Ring Around the Rosie). But the story checks out!

The version I heard seems to have descended from very similar versions that make it a bit more clear. They began:

The Princess Pat
Light Infantry
They sailed across
the seven seas (or Herring Sea)
They sailed across
The channel, too
and took with them
a ric-a-dam-doo

(the rest of this version is more or less the same as the one above, except that it deals with "Captain Dan" instead of "Captain Jack.")

Most interesting to me is how easily "Light infantry" changed to "lived in a tree," and how much that changes the narrative of the song. I knew the song had been around for a while, but I assumed it was written by a camp counselor. Nothing about the version I knew made me suspect that it had anything to do with a soldier's song, though it's hardly the first army song that gradually became a playground song. A great many of the naughty songs on this site startted out as soldier's songs - one thing that nearly every war has in common is that, in every war, soldiers make up endless naughty parodies of popular songs (here's a shameless plug for The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History, which includes a few of them).

There's another, earlier version that's much more explicitly about the army (and a bit more offensive, if you don't like to see the Canadian infantry made fun of). It begins:

The Princess Pat's Battalion
They sailed across the Herring Pond,
They sailed across the Channel too,
And landed there with the Ric-A-Dam-Doo
Dam-Doo, Dam-Doo.


The Princess Pat's Battalion Scouts
They never knew their whereabouts.
If there's a pub within a mile or two,
You'll find them there with the Ric-A-Dam-Doo,
Dam-Doo, Dam-Doo.


Split the lines in two and the tune could be the same, as long as you draw "battalion" out into four syllables.

Complete lyrics of that version, and a good deal more info on the history of the song (and why some find it offensive) can be seen here

Are You P.T.?

One of those trick questions that you had to learn a clever response to:

Are You P.T.?

The questioner would refuse to say what P.T. meant - a yes or no answer was required. If you said "Yes," they would then inform you that P.T. meant "pregnant teacher." If you said "no," it meant "potty trained." The best trick in my day was to answer by saying "Yes, I'm potty trained, but I'm not a pregnant teacher." The person trying to play the trick seldom found this amusing.

Anyway, this hit my school in Iowa around 1990. In the next week or so I'll post some similar "trick questions" that went around. I'll probably lump several into one post.

Starting a whole new label for this - "tricks." I'll now go through and apply it to a few other posts.

Jinx!

What do YOU do when you and another person say something at the same time? Is saying "Jinx" and forbidding someone to talk a recent custom, or an ancient one?

As far as I can tell, the most common response to such a situation today is that one party will say "jinx!" The other will be forbidden to talk until someone says their name. While there are variations (when I lived in Georgia, the person would say "jinx! 1, 2, 3, you owe me a coke!," which is was recorded in the midwest in the 1970s as well), the "no talking" rule is probably more common (especially since it's been on both The Simpsons and Recess). This isn't exactly the kind of thing where there's a lot of data going around, though.

Saying "jinx" at all, though, is actually a fairly new custom, even though its roots might go WAY back. Calling "jinx" when multiple people say the same thing at the same time didn't really catch on in the U.S. until after World War 2. Prior to that, a more common response was that each party simply had to name a poet (almost invariably, according to most of the books on the right) the first kid would name Shakespeare, the second would name Longfellow). Some variations had kids locking pinkies first, and sometimes it was said to be an omen: if two people said something at once, one of them was going to get a letter.

However, the origins of the game MAY go back even further, back as far as the 16th or 17th century, when there was a popular Scottish tavern game called "High Jinks" (also known as "High Pranks" or "Whig-meleery"), in which one would shout "High Jinks!" before throwing dice. Whoever lost a round had to perform a penalty, usually impersonating some character or another. If they broke character for one second, they had to take a drink, put extra towards the tab, or some other such penalty. There are two things that suggest that the modern "Jinx" game could descend from this:

1. In some, two people rolling the same number at the same time led to extra penalties.
2. According to some modern scholars (the Knapps on the right), one of the characters people commonly had to play in forfeits was a mute - ie, one who couldn't talk.

I'm not totally sure as to the validity of the second part (I couldn't find any source saying that impersonating a mute was common, though it's not hard to imagine). More peculiar, really, is that by all accounts the game was mostly forgotten by the early 19th century. Still, the similarities to the modern game are hard to ignore! It's quite possible that, while it MOSTLY died out, a handful of people still played variations that filtered their way to the playground in the 20th century.


Some other variations on saying the same thing at the same time:

- Whoever finishes first will marry first, according to Cornish folkore (late 19th century)
- Each person should touch thumbs or pinkies and make a wish (all over America, throughout the early 20th century)
- In the UK in the 50s, some kids said that they cried "White rabbits," and that whoever said it first would get a letter.
- Also in the UK, the practice of saying the name of a poet would make a wish come true, but in some places you were banned from saying "Shakespeare" (because he spears the wish) or Burns (because he burns it)
- In Iowa in the early 20th century, kids would press thumbs together and say "philopena."
- In some parts of both England and the States, kids would run to the chimney, shout "Shakespeare" up it, and make a wish. Sometimes in the states, this was followed by them saying "What goes up the chimney?/ Smoke!/ I wish this wish / may never be broke."

It's interesting that almost all of these were to do with getting good luck or wishes. But sometime after world war 2, it became (or re-became) a bit darker!

Left, left, left right left - sergeant's face is turning...

Here's a chant I learned in around fourth grade - a marching cadence that seems to be fairly little known, though it does come up on google once or twice:

Left, left, left right left
Sergeant's face is turning green
Left, left, left right left
somebody peed in his canteen
Left, left, left right left
Sergeant's face is turning black
Left, left, left right left
Somebody pooped in his backpack
Left, left, left right left
Sergeant's face is turning blue
Left, left, left right left
He's getting really pissed at you

Where did this come from? Was it originally an actual army marching cadence (plenty of the songs and rhymes that go around probably have roots in soldier songs). How widespread was it?

Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board: Levitation Games

The variation worked in my town like this:

Four people (girls, usually) would sit around a fifth, first chanting "I think she's sick" then "I think she's dead" while place two fingers under her body at strategic points. They would then chant "Light as a feather, stiff as a board" in intense concentration, ending by lifting the girl in the middle, who now appeared to be weightless."

Science tells us that it's all about distribution of weight, etc (the trick is mostly down to having the lifters in the right position) but it sure LOOKED like magic. An English boarding school guy (recorded by Opie) observed kids doing it in 1940 and wrote "Whether by self hypnosis or not I do not know, but the lifters, with a few fingers only under the armpits and knees, certainly lifted the seated one with ease and grace...it was more like real magic than anything I have ever seen."


But by 1940, the trick was already a very old one. Opie also dug up a report where a guy (samuel Pepys, if you're keeping score) wrote of a discussion of "enchantments, spells and charms" from 1665, in which'd he'd heard of French girls sitting around a seated one and lifting her up after chanting

Voyci un Corps mort,
Royde come un Baston
Froid comme Marbre
Leger comme un esprit
Levons te au nom de Jesus Christ

This loosely translates to pretty much the same chant heard now. Pepys marvelled that they even got it to work on the cook of the house, "a very lusty (fat) fellow." I'm especially interested in his concluding remark: "I enquired of him whether they were protestant or catholic, and he told me they were protestant, which made it the more strange to me!"

It is sometimes said that this was done as a means to ward off the plague, but that strikes me as just one of those plague stories that goes around without any basis in fact (a la Ring Around the Rosy ), except that 1665, when Pepys wrote his diary, was a plague year. You can read the diary here. Interesting that there was an explicit mention of this to lift the person in the name of Jesus Christ; people tend to complain that this is some form of devil worship or the occult nowadays. Perhaps the religious invocation in the chant was a form of guarding against the plague. My French isn't good enough to tell if there's anything about protection in there, but I don't THINK there is. I think I see "cold as marble" and "light as a ghost" in there before "levitate in the name of Jesus Christ."

Plenty of variations of how to play (and why it works) go around today - the chant changes somewhat, and some variations involve counting down from 100 or having everyone hold their breath. How did YOU do it?

The Vanishing Hitchhiker and the Ghosts of the Train Crossing

Once there was this guy who went out dancing and he met this girl. He danced with her all night, even though she seemed cold and distant. At the end of the night he offered her a ride home, and she said "okay." She didn't say much, other than to point him down Archer Road, and "the snows came early this year." Then when they came to the cemetery, she shouted "Pull over! You have to pull over now!" The guy said "I can't pull over here! This is the cemetery!" But she screamed "No! Pull over!" So he pulled over and said "okay, but you have to let me walk you the rest of the way home, okay?" She turned and said "Where I'm going, you can't follow." And she got out of the car, walked up to the cemetery gates, and vanished.

The Vanishing Hitchhiker is one of the most famous - and common - ghost stories in the world. Versions are recorded back to at least the third century BC. The most famous modern one is probably Resurrection Mary, who we've investigated like crazy around here in Chicago - she's a common topic on The Weird Chicago Blog. We've dug up census records, combed through newspaper, trying to figure out who she's the ghost of...all on the very broad presumption that she's not just an urban legend in the first place!

One story that people ask me a lot when I'm running tours based on her is "didn't she borrow someone's sweater?" Though I don't know of an account of this happening with Mary, the ghost borrowing a sweater, which turns up the next day on their grave, is a common variation - people my age and younger know it from "THe Night It Rained," the variation that appeared in Alvin Schwartz's immortal Easy Reader "In a Dark Dark Room" (which scared the pants off me as a kid, and still spooked me this week when my six year old stepson was reading it!). People older than me tend to know it from that "Strange Things Happen in This World" song.

My favorite variation is one i saw on one of those ghost TV programs back in the 90s - a guy gave a ride to a little girl only to have her vanish out of the car. He went to her door and the woman said "it couldn't have been my daughter - you just let my daughter rest in peace!" He then noticed a picture of the girl on the wall. Seeing a picture on the wall is another common touch in these stories, but here's where the TV show differed: in this, the girl was the ghost of a kid whose school bus was hit by a train, and who now, along with other ghostly kids, push cars over railroad tracks. Two urban legends in one! The old "ghostly kids pushing cars over the tracks" story is almost as common as the vanishing hitcher - there're something like 50 such places in the country, most of which (including the one in the TV show, which focused on the San Antonio version) are nowhere near any place where there was ever actually a bus/train accident.

But this is a common urban legend - there are many places where you can put your car in neutral and find yourself rolling across the tracks, then pour some powder on your fender in see fingerprints. I don't know of any place where this can actually be considered supernatural - invariably, it turns out that the road is just a downhill road that doesn't LOOK downhill, the fingerprints are usually your own, and the long-ago train accident never actually happened.

Mary is probably the most famous of the hitchers, and the tracks in San Antonio are probably the most famous car-pushers, but variations pop up all over the world. Maybe I'm being too flip by dismising them as folklore. After all, there are quite a number of first-hand accounts of Mary, and who am I to say that dead people aren't put on car-pushing duty til they earn their wings?

Davy Crocket had a Rocket

Around 1986, the kid who lived next door to me was going around saying this one:

Davy Crocket had a rocket
put it in his pocket

I assumed he'd made it up - and maybe he had. But he surely wasn't the first kid to come up with that - it probably goes back to 30 years earlier, when the Crocket craze hit. The effects of it were still seen on playgrounds in my day.

Iona Opie noted that the following similar one was current in Worcester in 1935:

Jack the Ripper stole a kipper
hid it in his father's slipper

How many other rhymes like this are going around?

Hail to the Bus Driver

This one's a bit of a puzzler. The song, sung to the tune of "The More We Get Together" (which, itself, is to the tune of some German song, though I doubt that was what the author of the parody had in mind), goes about like this:


Hail to the bus driver,
Bus driver!
Bus driver!
Hail to the bus driver,
Bus driver man.

He yells and he cusses,
and smells up the busses,
Hail to the bus driver,
Bus driver man.

He steps on the clutch
and the toilet goes flush.
Hail to the bus driver,
Bus driver man.

Those are the lyrics as presented by The Simpsons in the early 1990s. Another verse I've heard goes:

He drinks and he smokes
and he tells dirty jokes
Hail...

But here's the thing - as far as I can tell, the song was never collected or published before that episode of The Simpsons. I haven't found it in any collection of playground or camp songs so far. However, when that episode aired, I knew kids who claimed to have learned the song at camp the year before.

If it's not a Simpsons original, I suspect it was probably written by a camp counselor - it's a bit more sophisticated, and not quite as obscene, as what you normally see in a "for kids by kids" song (though I'm SURE kids have written more verses).

So is this truly a Simpsons original? Did you know it before that episode? What verses did you sing?

Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear: The Long History of a Jump Rope Rhyme

One of the most popular, and fascinating, jump rope rhymes/games out there, known all over the English-speaking world:

Teddy bear, teddy bear, turn around
Teddy bear, teddy bear, touch the ground
Teddy bear, teddy bear, go upstairs
Teddy bear, teddy bear, say your prayers
Teddy bear, teddy bear, turn out the light
Teddy bear, teddy bear, say good night!

Not just a chant but an activity - the jumper turns around, touches the ground, etc. at the corresponding line, running away from the rope on the last line. It's been recorded as "Shirley Temple turn around," as well as "Charlie Chaplin turn around," etc, as well as any number of others. Dozens of variations have been recorded in the last century.

(or check a local store)

"Teddy Bear" is by far the most common version today (and has been since about the 1920s), but the rhyme itself goes back to before anyone called toy bears Teddy Bears (which was a reference to Teddy Roosevelt, which you already know if you've read The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History) (or, well, any other history book). Exactly how far back the rhyme goes is hard to tell, but if I had to guess, I'd try to connect it to an 18th century nursery rhyme or something - in fact, certain versions MAY connect it to one particular 18th century nursery rhyme that MAY connect it to ancient murder ballads. There's no way to prove it, but it's a pretty entertaining theory. Hear me out on this:

A version dated 1912 goes:

Ladybug, ladybug, turn around
ladybug, ladybug, touch the gound

While "butterfly, butterfly" was probably the most common opening by the 1910s, "lady," "old lady," "ladybug" and "ladybird" were also common. This MAY connect it back to one of the creepest nursery rhymes ever to be paraphrased in a Tom Waits song:

lady bird, lady bird, fly away home
your house is on fire, your children are all gone
all except one, that's little ann
she's hiding under a frying pan.
(note - this is also sometimes listed as "butterfly, butterfly," and, as with any self respecting nursery rhyme, there are many variations).

The rhyme goes back to at least the 1740s, and by the 1950s, it was a common rhyme to say if you found a ladybug on the way to school. Now, I try not to get into nursery rhyme origins - most of the ones you hear are guesses at best and nonsense at worst - but this one seems like it almost HAS to have some sort of hidden (or long-lost) meaning. One 1902 folklore journal suggested that butterflies were, in some superstitions, manifestations of someone's soul, which might mean that we can connect "Teddy Bear Teddy Bear" back to all of those ancient murder ballads where people come back as a talking bird (though it might also just be plain old BS; the best explanation I could find was that it was a rhyme about smoking bugs out of your house, which is probably more sensible than assigning anything mystical to it).

So maybe it doesn't go back to murder ballads, but it may also hold a clue to one of the great linguistic mysteries of the 20th century. Here's a version that was published in 1909:

Butterfly, butterfly turn around
Butterfly, butterfly touch the ground
Butterfly, butterfly show your shoe
Butterfly, butterfly twenty three to do!


The interesting thing here is the phrase "twenty three to do." In the 1920s, "twenty three skidoo" was popular slang term for "to leave quickly," as the jumper presumably did at that point in the rhyme. Now, exactly where that phrase came from is one of the great mysteries of American slang. There are plenty of theories out there, and some of them are charming, but none are particularly convincing. If this version of the rhyme does date to much earlier than 1909 (and for a rhyme to be published when it was brand new would be fairly unusual), that would strongly suggest that "twenty three skidoo" was based on a mispronunciation of "twenty three to do." Of course, this begs the question of what the phrase "twenty three to do" was all about (if, in fact, it pre-dated "twenty three skidoo" in the first place). In 1926, a book was pulblished listing the rhyme as ending withOld Woman, twenty three skidoo!. By then, going around saying "23 skidoo" as often as possible was a national craze. Could it have started with "23" being a cue to get out during a jump rope rhyme?

Getting back to the present era and out of the realm of speculation, in the 1990s a "taunt" version showed up on the cartoon "Recess:"

Ashley, Ashley, turn around
Ashley, Ashley, touch the ground
Ashley, Ashley, in a skirt
Ashley, Ashley, go eat dirt!

I'd be interested to see if the fact that it was on TV has made this become more popular as a "taunt" than a jump rope rhyme; the media's impact on this stuff is always an interesting x factor.

As a parting note, when I was in kindergarten, my music teacher taught us a musical version that I believe went like this:

Little green ghost,turn around
Little green ghost,turn around
Little green ghost,turn around
Little green ghost,turn around
Halloween is coming

I think there were other verses about touching the ground, etc. The melody was sort of like Skip to My Lou, only slowed down to a dirge. I thought it was scary, until my friend Ben rewrote it as:

Little green ghost, cut the cheese....

I thought this was even funnier after someone told me what "cut the cheese" meant.

So, does "Teddy bear teddy bear" form a link in a chain that goes back to ancient murder ballads? Does it hold the key to the origin of a 20th century slang term? What other variations went around? Leave a comment!

The Dolly Parton calculator joke

This seems to be widespread, but everyone has a different idea of the narrative. It was a joke performed on a calculator. The narrative I first heard went as follows:

"Dolly Parton wears bra size 59 (type 59 into the calculator). That's too, too, too big. (type 2 2 2). The doctor gives her fifty-one pills (type 51) to take for 8 days (type x 8). And she ends up...."

The answer is 55378008. Turn it upside-down and it says "BOOBLESS."

The narrative varied even in my school. The kid who taught me the Diarrhea song opened it with "Dolly Parton's boobs weigh 59 pounds..." The girls in my 6th grade had a version where the multiplication key stood for "Dr. X."

Googling around, it looks like this was going around by 1984. Not sure how much further back it could go - probably started among engineering students in college who had calculators before other people did.

What You See is What You Are....

What you see is what you are.
You're a naked movie star!

This was a popular taunt among younger kids at my grade school (Iowa, mid 80s), and the research I've done on it was a real shocker. As it turns out, we were VERY lucky that nothing bad came of our repeating it.

I'm sure it was more widespread than this, but from what I can find on google, this seems to have been current in exactly two places: my school, and a pre-school in California (edit: comments indicate that it was also current in southern IL, where kids learned it from kids who had moved in from St. Louis, so it was definitely fairly widespread). To my knowledge, no one got in any trouble because of it in Iowa. But in California, the fact that kids were saying this was seen as "proof" that the kids were being sexually abused and forced to participate in bizarre Satanic rituals involving human sacrifice.

So this was the rhyme that kicked off the McMartin Preschool Trial, which, in turn, started the Satanic Panic era, when talk show hosts, televangelists, and assorted hucksters convinced parents that there were millions of Satanists operating as part of a massive international conspiracy disguised as priests, pre-school teachers, day care center owners, and, in many versions of the theory, the Pope. According to these stories, children everywhere were not just being abused and forced to star in child porn films while at day care, they were being dragged into underground basements and secret lairs to participate in all sorts of hideous rituals that were setting up the world for Satan to take over. Most of the stories veered well into the realm of the absurd. It was, especially in hindsight, a case of mass hysteria.

Many people (mostly women, in contrast to most sexual abuse cases) were taken into court and - even sent to jail - on evidence no stronger than kids knowing the rhyme above. As far as I know, they're all out of jail now - the kids grew older and said their testimony was just them telling the investigators what they wanted to hear.

I probabaly shouldn't go into it too much here - even now, I'm afraid I'll get some nasty mail for being skeptic about widespread satanic ritual abuse. The book on the left is the best I've seen on the whole sordid affair. Looking through it now, I'm just glad that no teacher in my town (that I know of) was accused of anything on the basis that we knew this rhyme - some parent could have heard that rhyme on the news and thought it was a warning sign. This isn't to say that nothing bad or outrageous ever happened in my town (heck, the DARE officer turned out to be selling crack), but I feel like I'm safe in saying that there wasn't much in the way of Satanism in Des Moines.

But, anyway, I assume that kids outside of that one pre-school and my elementary school knew that rhyme. Did it go back far enough, at least in Des Moines, that parents knew not to be alarmed by it? Any other sightings?