Bingo bango bongo, I never noticed that. I tried saying 'fee fi fo fum' backwards and it took me about 10 times to get it right. There's almost a musical cadence to the usual order that just sounds off key when said backwards.
This is language-dependent. The Japanese syllabary is sorted in the order a-i-u-e-o, which is weird to the Western ear, but as ubiquitous as A-B-C in Japan.
It's probably not unwritten. It's similar to how we conjugate irregular verbs like "sing/ring" or "beget". The topic in linguistics is called vowel gradation [0].
I'm fascinated by this. In my native Russian, there's a children's counting rhyme "ene bene raba kvinter finter zhaba" (and the more popular "eniki beniki were eating vareniki").
You can see some resemblence of "ene bene" to "eeny meeny...", and "kvinter finter" to "tethera, methera".
I'm mostly puzzled how it was spread. How did children in Russia learn about this? It's not like it was very common in Russia to see someone from Britain, especially in the countryside.
There's a theory that "eeny meeny" just means "one two" in some original language when humanity spread, and it was conserved in children rhymes, that get transmitted mostly unchanged from generation to generation.
Your Russian version is very interesting, because I also see similarities between "kvinter/finter" and latin "qinque", greek "penta" (both mean "five"), and "zhaba" may relate to Latin "sex", English "six" and so on. So the Russian version may remember even more original number words. The German version "ene mene muh" is sadly degraded compared to the others.
>In the canonical Eeny Meeny, “tiger” is standard in the second line, but this is a relatively recent revision.
I'm old enough that as a young child I heard adults reciting both versions (U.S. urban location). Since this is about "ambiguous history", I noticed that it seems none of the other languages have versions that are as explicitly derogatory/racist as the original English version.
>The shared genetics of all these counting-out ditties strongly imply an ür-Eeny Meeny. 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. These prehistories range from charmingly whimsical to patently bogus.
I wonder how often it happens that the leaders of any society imbue secondary messages into these counting-out rhymes as a way of indoctrinating the children?
[edit] I just re-read the following, which elaborates on this idea:
>The original “Catch a n*** by the toe,” according to Bickerton, points to the rhyme’s roots in an African American community.
> 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.)
Oh there’s a word for this. The first time I was in the U.S. I was looking for an ATM and someone said there was a biyouvet down the road. I wasn’t sure what a biyouvet was but it sounded French and exotic. I asked them if the biyouvet had ATMs and was assured it did, and went on my way to find the aforementioned biyouvet - before I could though I found a Bank of America which did in fact have ATMs.
I seem to recall baffling people on my first visit to the US by asking them if they knew where a "cash machine" could be found. Either that wasn't a common term for ATM or my strong British accent confounded them.
Ha, people in the US should know what a cash machine is. It may have been the accent, but I’m having a hard time imagining how even the most severe British accent would make “cash machine” that hard to understand. Now if you were Scottish, on the other hand…
Virtually a BBC accent, so who knows? A bit later in Texas I had trouble ordering a tuna sandwich because of the stark difference between "tooona" (US) and "tyouna" (UK). To be fair they're very different sounds.
The first time I was introduced to a Glaswegian colleague I just smiled and nodded because I had not the faintest idea what he was saying (the ear tunes in pretty quickly though).
Yeah, the ew sound isn't commonly understood - try asking for a Mountain Dew. I've been visiting America for 20 years and I still can't get people to understand what I want to drink.
Which means Americans have homophones that are not homophones in other variants of English. Leading to, for example, confusion over whether someone should "make do" or "make due". In British English, there is no ambiguity, and one makes do
Not a common term here. It is somewhat ambiguous with "cash register", so some people's brains may not immediately or strongly select the correct interpretation. Some will just fine though.
The person directing them to the ATM said “B of A”, and the person looking for the ATM heard “bi youv ay”, which they thought was a word they hadn’t heard before. “B of A” = “bi yuv ay” = “biyouvet”.
A longer rhyme was this (hyphens showing where the unstressed word isn't the next child)
There's-a party on-the hill, can-you come?
Bring-your own bread-and butter and-a bun.
Who is your best friend?
James [By landed-on child]
Jay ay em e es
You are NOT IT!
With this, you could choose a suitable name and ensure you were out/not-yet-out accordingly.
Lots of presumably learned research and obscure historical fact in that article. But it continually states that eeny-meeny is a 'counting system' eg. "used by shepherds to count their sheep" etc.
Eeeny-meeny is not a counting system. Why would people use a nonsense rhyme to count things? It makes no sense (literally!). Eeny-meeny is used as a 'random selection system' when choosing arbitrarily from a series of options.
Odd to get that basic fact wrong in such an in-depth article.
After reading the article. I don’t see where they said it was a counting system. Rather that it has the same rhyming structure as counting systems and so it had to be considered a possibility that it came from that. Which by the end they said was very unlikely.
Point taken. I suppose the 'out' is open to interpretation. I read it as in 'counting out[loud]' or just 'counting out [the number of something]'. But I can see how they could have meant it as in 'counting out [which ones amongst X sheep were for mating/selling/killing/etc.
These kinds of etymologies are so fun. Other interesting “schoolyard sayings” to look up are high five (surprisingly recent) and rock‐paper‐scissors (surprisingly old).
The "Eeny meeny" rhyme with the objectionable N word in the second line was the first version I learned on the playground as a kid. I didn't know what that word meant, and was quickly disabused by my parents when I repeated it.
In a series of words which differ only (or mostly) by the vowel used, the order should be e, i, a, o
- tic tac toe
- flim flam
- ding dong
- king kong
If you doubt it, try saying the opposite and hear how odd it sounds: The clock went 'Tock Tick'