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Various suggestions have been made as to what the words mean, such as being the first four numbers in some ancient language that have been miraculously preserved among children. According to the Opies, the n-word version, imported from the United States, subsequently became more common in Britain.
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This is the favorite with American children, actually reported from nearly every State in the Union.īolton also reports n-word variants from Scotland and Ireland. William Wells Newell, in his 1883 Games and Songs of American Children, provides three variants from three different states:īut it is Bolton’s 1888 The Counting-Out Rhymes of Children that provides the most comprehensive overview of differing versions, including the version that I know from my childhood, the first to include the n-word: So, they basic scheme of the rhyme seems to have been well established by then: Some six months later, in February 1855, another correspondent to Notes and Queries gives the earliest recorded version, from the United States. It’s a British version appearing in the journal Notes and Queries in 1854, recollected from the writer’s memory of their childhood of uncertain date: The earliest that I know barely belongs within this group, but it does use the nonsense word eeny. In large part because few people bothered to write down what children were saying before the nineteenth century, we can’t say with any certainty how long children have been chanting eeny, meany., but similar counting-out rhymes have been recorded since the mid nineteenth century. The eeny, meany ones, 78 in total from across the United States, Great Britain, and Ireland, occupy two of these groups, one with the n-word and one without. Henry Bolton’s 1888 book on the subject records 877 different counting-out rhymes in a number of languages, dividing the English-language ones into thirteen distinct types. There are many different counting-out rhymes. The deliberate suppression of racist versions would seem to have begun somewhat earlier, but non-racist versions have always existed alongside the n-word ones. The Opies say the n-word in the rhyme was replaced with words like tiger, spider, and beggar in the mid 1970s, but I recall both the n-word and tiger competing during my childhood in the late 1960s, with the n-word version being taboo and transgressive even then.
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The n-word variants appear to have originated in the United States, but quickly spread to other English-speaking countries. The n-word is not found in the earliest versions from the 1850s, but is recorded in the 1880s. The headline version presented in the Iona and Peter Opie’s Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes is: There are numerous variant versions that have been recorded over the years. Many versions of the rhyme, especially ones from fifty or more years ago, are racist, deploying the n-word, an example of how racism is developed and fostered in young children. The words are simply nonsense syllables, with no intrinsic meaning. Eeny, meany, miney, moe, with variations in spelling, is a common counting-out rhyme used by children to select sides in a game or to select who is “it” in tag or other such games.