![]() ![]() On other occasions, black airplane passengers said they were humiliated because of the rhyme’s “racist history” after a Southwest Airlines flight attendant, encouraging them to sit down on the plane so it could take off, said, “Eeny meeny miny mo, Please sit down it’s time to go.” So there’s the door and when I count four,Īdding to the problem, reportedly in 1993, a school teacher in Mequon, Wisconsin, provoked a student walkout when she said in reference to poor test scores, “What did you do? Just go eeny, meeny, miny, moe, catch a n-r by the toe?” This caused the school’s district superintendent to recommend the teacher “lose three days of pay, undergo racial sensitivity training, and have a memorandum detailing the incident placed in her personnel file.” Versions like the below also appeared in Australia, unfortunately.īert Fitzgibbon’s 1906 song offers a window into this ugliness:īut when you get money, your little bride Bolton even reports that this was the most common version among American school children as of 1888, showing how ugly our history has been at times. During times of slavery, the word “tiger” was replaced by the N-word. Of course, the rhyme has been made ugly and abused. And there will be more into the centuries, most likely. Of course, throughout history, there are even more of these rhythmic, nonsense-sounding rhymes. There is a Swahili poem brought to the Americas by enslaved Africans that goes: Iino ya mmiini maiini mo. An old shepherd’s count is known as the “Yan Tan Tehera” and the Cornish “End, mena, mona, mite” above.Īnother explanation comes from British colonists who returned from India after learning the rhyme used in carom billiards: baji, neki, baji, thou, elim, tilim, latim, gou. Likely, the rhyme that we know today comes to us from Old English or Welsh counting, likely from farm jobs, such as counting sheep or crops.
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