Primark pulls t-shirt in racist TWD merchandise

Ursa major said:

The point is, though, that many nursery rhymes have very long histories, and it doesn't matter whether or not those keeping them alive between the time they were first composed and today (or whenever they dropped from general view) were ever participants in the events on which the rhymes were based.

After all, the children singing/reciting them down the ages weren't, so why should those sailors have been?

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What I was getting at is that there isn't a strong connection between the people that ran the ships and the people who bought slaves once they were off-loaded.

But "pick" also can mean "cull", and the rhyme may refer to the shipboard process of finding and removing dead slaves from the hold and tossing their bodies overboard in transit.

Or, it can be a silly reference to Brazil nut harvesting. It is kind of hard to tell 200 years later, but the fact that this was big in England would appear to make it less likely to be directly from market patter within the colonies. (None of which is a judgement about the merits, just the etymology.)

It could have been repurposed and used.

RX-79G said:

What I was getting at is that there isn't a strong connection between the people that ran the ships and the people who bought slaves once they were off-loaded.

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There isn't a strong connection between me and the vast majority of those who know (or knew) the rhyme (other than almost all of them will have at least some** knowledge of the English language). In a way, that's the point of these rhymes (particularly those designed to carry a message). They're sort of like earworms: easy to "catch"; less easy to forget.


** - When I first heard the rhyme, I didn't know that much English, even though it's my native (and sole) language, as I was quite young).

Ursa major said:

There isn't a strong connection between me and the vast majority of those who know (or knew) the rhyme (other than almost all of them will have at least some** knowledge of the English language). In a way, that's the point of these rhymes (particularly those designed to carry a message). They're sort of like earworms: easy to "catch"; less easy to forget.


** - When I first heard the rhyme, I didn't know that much English, even though it's my native (and sole) language, as I was quite young).

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My point being that it's rather imaginative path to get all the way back to gangrene and slave marketeers without some actual documentation. There are much more likely scenarios, some of which are just as ugly, others less so. Gangrenous toe inspection is a rather visceral theory, which may be why it is an attractive meme.

To insist that this is the test of whether that origin is true or not rather requires you to supply the documentation for a different explanation.

Good luck with that.

The Wikipedia article Eeny, meeny, miny, moe - Wikipedia traces its history through other counting games using nonsense words such as -
Hana, man, mona, mike;
Barcelona, bona, strike;
Hare, ware, frown, vanac;
Harrico, warico, we wo, wac

and even suggests an Anglo Saxon origin. The writers of the The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes suggest that as the n-word was common in the US but not found in English rhymes/proverbs, plus evidence of earlier versions in the UK which didn't use the word, it pointed to this version originating in North America. Interestingly, the article suggest that this version was popularised subsequently in the UK by its inclusion in a book by Rudyard Kipling in 1935 as "A Counting-Out Song", from Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides

So if it was originally a harmless counting game that this word was substituted into, it does suggest that the origin suggested from slavery practices is actually a much later rationalisation. Obviously its use is now very offensive. The 'safe' version I'm familiar with is 'catch a teacher by his toe'.

By the way, this wasn't meant to be a response to your post Ursa, I'd been reading that rather long Wikipedia article after googling the phrase and didn't finish my post until just now.

Ursa major said:

To insist that this is the test of whether that origin is true or not rather requires you to supply the documentation for a different explanation.

Good luck with that.

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I'm not sure what the conflict is. Someone brought up this theory, and there are no references I could find to it. And I'm saying that; aside from it having no historical documentation, it doesn't actually sound super-likely either.

What we do have are references that show that the rhyme is likely from outside America. Adding the N-word to it could have happened on English ships or on Colonial plantations, but the specificity of the gangrene story should be questioned, because it sounds like a "fact", but facts have academia to go with them.

RX-79G said:

I'm not sure what the conflict is.

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The conflict seems to be that you have just heavily implied that evidence** needs to be produced for one origin (the one you are arguing against, it seems) when little exists for any specific origin. Some proposed origins may or may not be likelier than others, not no-one actually knows. That, right at the start, some sort of counting game -- no-one knows which one it is, by the way -- actually underlies the song(s) we now have is neither here nor there.

Think of a song that has sampled another (maybe even payig royalty on the use of the sampled material) and then added new words. The origin of those added words does not lie with the sampled song; it lies with the person or persons who added them to the original one. That is what has happened here. The fact that those words did not exist in the original counting song does not make them (and their meaning) any less (or any more) authentic in terms of the song we now have. It depends on the circumstances at the time the words were added and, perhaps***, the intentions of those who added the words.


** -

RX-79G said:

without some actual documentation

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*** - I say, perhaps, because sometimes such things have a life of their own, and the added words are taken to mean something else entirely (perhaps even the opposite of what was intended).

Ursa major said:

The conflict seems to be that you have just heavily implied that evidence** needs to be produced for one origin (the one you are arguing against, it seems) when little exists for any specific origin

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This is exactly what I've been getting at. The gangrene meme pops up with some frequency, but unlike other nursery rhyme origins, this one appears to have no connection to actual history.

I'm not saying that any explanation is untrue. I'm saying it is poor idea to fasten on and keep repeating the most interesting and lurid ones, because it makes it less likely to accept the actual (and quite possibly boring) story should it ever come to light. As you say:

Ursa major said:

*** - I say, perhaps, because sometimes such things have a life of their own, and the added words are taken to mean something else entirely (perhaps even the opposite of what was intended).

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The most gruesome stories are always going to be the ones we like to repeat.

Different people will fasten on different things. The fact that none of them are definitively the correct one** -- the documentation, as you put it, is incomplete and thus inconclusive -- means that there is no way of proving that any the others are wrong.


** - As I suggested in my previous post, many of them may be correct, in terms of them being produced at the time (or within living memory) of the events (supposedly) implied.

RX-79G said:

My point being that it's rather imaginative path to get all the way back to gangrene and slave marketeers without some actual documentation.

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Indeed, and it's interesting that @pambaddeley refers to suggestions that it could go all the way back to the Anglo-Saxon period.

I think it's one thing to say that counting rhymes date back to antiquity, and another to argue that the specific pattern of this one does.

I find it difficult to recognise what the author means when she suggests the "Yan, tan, tethera, methera..." rhyme is the origin of "Eeny, meeny..." etc. Maybe the Irish one is closer.

"In 1982, similarly, Derek Bickerton postulated that the rhyme derives from Saõ Tomenese, a Creole language spoken by African slaves. 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 n-- by the toe,” according to Bickerton, points to the rhyme’s roots in an African American community.

But there may be an answer when we search for sound instead of sense. Eeny Meeny traces its ancestry to an ancient British counting system: the Anglo-Cymric Score. Across northern England and southern Scotland, a set of numerals exists for specific, ritual purposes: shepherds use it to count sheep, women to keep track of knitting, fishermen to harvest their catch. Peasants knew the system for centuries as “Yan tan tethera.” Rhythmically, the score divides into fives (think number of fingers per hand), with a pronounced lilt and an emphasis on rhyming pairs. Words vary from region to region, but the score goes something like this:

Yan, tan, tethera, methera, pimp,
Sethera, lethera, hothera, dovera, dick,
Yan-dick, tan-dick, tether-dick, mether-dick, bumfit,
Yan-a-bumfit, tan-a-bumfit, tethera bumfit, pethera bumfit, gigert.

Similar counting scores exist in Ireland (Eina, mina, pera, peppera, pinn) and in the United States (Een, teen, tether, fether, fip)."

Losing Count

Hex said:

Across northern England and southern Scotland

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It was definitely used in my parent's home county, Cumberland (now part of Cumbria).

I know it too (my dad's from that area) but while it's a counting rhyme, it feels like a couple of steps away from eeny meeny.

Hex said:

it feels like a couple of steps away from eeny meeny

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I've never thought of them as having anything to do with each other until now, and I'm far from convinced now.

For one thing, the rhythm is all wrong, eeny meeny... being la-la, la-la, la-la, la and the counting system being anything but.