Children's rhymes

Was reading this thread just now and asked a friend what the local rhymes are, and at some point we got to "ring around the rosie" and she said something about it being evil. I was confused and asked about this, and she said it was about raising the dead. I got distracted explaining about the plague, and then asked what the story she knew was. I had a hard time following it but it had something to do with experimentation and television. We got interrupted so i didnt hear the whole thing; im going to ask her later or next week because ?????????what

 

Variations of a couple of the rhymes above that we used for hand clapping games:

My name is (arms start forearms over each other in front of you lifting one on 'name' and the other on 'is')
Cinderella dressed in yella
Went to the ball to meet a fella
By mistake she kissed a snake
And went home with a belly ache (at which point you tickled the person you were playing with's stomach)

Looking at that rhyme now kissing a snake and ending up with an ache in your belly is kinda dodgy.

It would appear that this one is a frankenstein of a few rhymes pushed together:

Spoiler: long

Apple on a stick
Can make you sick
make your heart beat 2/46
Not because it's dirty
Not because it's clean
Not because you kissed a boy
Behind a magazine
Boys, Boys
They're a lot of fun
But here come the girls
With the blue jeans on
They can do the pom poms
They can do the splits
But I bet you five bucks they can't do this
(Here we had two versions so either you slid your feet apart to the count of three and repeated the whole rhyme until someone fell over or you continued on)
Now close you're eyes
And count to ten
Whoever messes up
Is a big Fat hen
(close your eyes and keep playing while counting to ten)
So you didn't mess it up
And you're not a big fat hen
But the next one to move
Is a bumblebee
And that will not be me
(on 'that will not be me' clap once for each word then freeze and hope the other person moves first.

 

has everyone here heard of the "joe" hand game? there are two i know, actually

 

Sounds kinda like the japanese kid's song 'Kagome, Kagome' (circle, circle) getting a creepypasta attached to it and a creepy-sounding Vocaloids' cover so that no westerner can ever hear it without getting shivers ever again XD Maybe it's a corruption of a similar urban myth?

(On the subject of japanese playground songs, I need to learn the Tanuki song better because any song about balls going 'swing swing swing' is exactly my jam XDD)

 

My mum taught me a few little rhymes when I was small... some of them were bits of more adult songs or poetry but there were a good number of little self-contained ones. They're mostly tricky ones like

'I saw Esau sitting on a seesaw,
How many esses in that?'

and 'Constantinople is a very long name, if you can't spell it, you are a nit'

Or wordplay like
'Ask your mother for sixpence,
To see the new giraffe,
Spots on his neck and spots on his
Ask your mother for sixpence'

'When I was a hill all covered in grass,
Down came a monkey sliding on his-
Don't be mistaken girls,
Don't be misled!
Down came a monkey,
Sliding on his head!'

I never really played clapping games, I know there were a couple but I had no friends and nobody would teach me so I don't know what they were. I vaguely remember playing something like london bridge is falling down once though, though the rhyme i remember that ends with 'and here comes the chopper to chop off your head' and is about bells...

'Oranges and lemons say the bells of St Clements
You owe me two farthings say the bells of St Martins
When will you pay me say the bells of Old Bailey
When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch
When will that be, say the bells of Stepney
I'm sure I don't know, says the great bell of Bow

Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
Here come a chopper to chop off your head,
One, Two, Three!'

 

tracked down the friend and got her to tell me the whole thing from the beginning, and i'm still confused about some parts but for the most part it makes sense in an urban myth sort of way:

way back when, televisions were different and not as safe, and a bunch of people died from them, including a little girl's best friend. the girl and her friend had been making up a little rhyme (ring around the rosie), but hadn't finished it before the friend died. the bodies were all burned, for some reason or other, and the little girl added the "ashes, ashes, they all fall down" line and finished the rhyme. also she sold her soul to the devil ("she didn't know better. she was just a kid. she still is.") but that seemed added as an afterthought.

i asked my friend who told her that, and she said everyone knew it. by this point another friend had joined us, and i asked her if she knew it and if so who she'd heard it from, and she said that her grandmother had told her about it.

 

We had those other verses to the bumblebee song too. When we did it the first verse was "I'm bringing home a baby bumblebee" so after mopping it up there was something about putting it in a bucket and then repeating the first verse

 

ours went:
X marks the spot/with a circle and a dot/spiders crawling up your back/they bite! they bite!/spiders crawling up your back/they bite! they bite!/cool breeze [beat]/tight squeeze [beat]/now you've got the shiveries!
these regional/temporal variations are really interesting!

@Deresto we had the "Cinderella/dressed in yella" one too, with the same words, I think! and @Birdy we had the same bubblegum one for choosing, plus the Tarzan one, with slightly different words:
Tar-zan/the mon-key man/swing-in' by/a rub-ber band/pop goes the rub-ber band/what col-or was his blood?
everyone would sing it, and there would be a designated person going around the circle pointing at someone for each syllable, and whoever they pointed at for the last syllable would name a color. then they would point at someone for each letter as we spelled out the color, and once we were done we'd say the color again and they'd point at one last person, and they would be out. I was that contrary little shit who picked colors like "chartreuse" that no one else knew how to spell. :P

our version of Eenie Meenie Miney Moe went:
eenie meenie money moe/catch a tiger by the toe/if he hollers/let him go/eenie meenie money moe/my mother/told me/to pick/the very best one/and you/are/it!
(trying to capture changes in inflection with the line breaks there.)

@Re Allyssa we had the same cookie jar one, except the line was "not me!" instead of "couldn't be." we also had one about skunks and stinks, I think to the same rhythm? you also named someone else if you got accused.

we played these at summer camp, mostly, when we were herded together with nothing else to do, like on the bus. maybe other kids played them at recess or something, but I avoided other kids at recess. :P and it wasn't exactly a rhyme, but for some reason we'd sing Queen's "We Will Rock You" on the bus together??? and stamp/clap to it??? this part specifically:
buddy, you're a young man, poor man/swingin' in the street/gonna take on the world someday/got mud on your face/you big disgrace/kickin' your can all over the place
then the chorus. the singing was, invariably, terrible, especially because the range of those lines is pretty big, since, y'know, Freddie Mercury. :P

for reference, this all was like 2008-2012 or so, so fairly recently!

 

@esotericPrognosticator oh hey, we played the same eenie meenie miney moe as well.

 

For eenie meenie miney moe we had tigger (instead of tiger) and squeals instead of hollers. Years later my friend's mum informed us that when she was a kid it had the n word. We always ended it with "pig snout pig snout you are (not) out" or pig snit if we wanted someone to be it for tag or whatever.

 

oh! oh! we'd do one called concentration, which was always hard for me to do because you had to like, hold your hands out? one palm-up, one palm-down, with your friend's done the opposite way, so you could clap out the beat in the weirdest way possible. that, combined with doing it fast, the way the game worked, and clapping normally between every verse made it a Challenge for smol me :') it went like this, with two weird claps per line

let's play (clap clap clap)
concentration (clap clap clap)
no repeats (clap clap clap)
or hesitation (clap clap clap)
[one kid says this, then the other] i'll go first (clap clap clap)
i'll go last (clap clap clap)
category is (clap clap clap)

and then you'd list like "colors" or something, and you had to keep up the clapping while you took turns naming stuff

 

Three seems to be the magic number in a lot of these: three claps, or three repetitions of a word

 

Eenie meenie miney mo variation:

Eenie meenie miney mo,
Catch a tiger by the toe.
If he hollers,
Make him pay
Fifty dollars every day!
My-mom-told-me-to-pick-the-very-best-one-and-you-are-not-it!

The last part was very chant-y.

 

the one i know is:

eeenie meenie miney mo
catch a tiger by the toe
if he hollers, let him go
out goes Y-O-U

 

Oh, another jump rope game we did (that most certainly had more lines to it but no one knew them) was the pepper song.

It went something like "yellow pepper green pepper orange pepper" with a steady spin of the rope while saying different colored peppers, then you yelled " red hot chilli pepper!" and spun it way too fast for the jumper to keep up with.

 

We also had "shame" the clapping game, which was played by placing the backs of your right hand against your partners' and then clapping either above, below, or your own hand in the middle. Every time the rhyme repeated you clapped in the same place, but otherwise you moved up and down. The very beginning was you brushing your hands together against your partners (I really don't know how else to describe it.)

Shame, shame shame.
I do get wanna go to Mexico no more, more, more
There's a big fat policeman at the door, door, door
If he grabs you by the collar, girl you better holler
I don't want to go to Mexico no more, more, more
Shame!

There was a variant where the policeman made you pay a dollar, too. Which is... Pretty astute commentary on border control for elementary schoolers, I think.