Eeny, meeny, miny, moe

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"Eeny, meeny, miny, moe" – which can be spelled a number of ways – is a children's counting-out rhyme, used to select a person in games such as tag, or for selecting various other things. It is one of a large group of similar rhymes in which the child who is pointed to by the chanter on the last syllable is chosen. The rhyme has existed in various forms since well before 1820<ref>I. & P. Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery rhymes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951, 1952), p. 12.</ref> and is common in many languages using similar-sounding nonsense syllables. Some versions use a racial slur, which has made the rhyme controversial at times.

Since many similar counting-out rhymes existed earlier, it is difficult to know its exact origin.

Current version

A common modern version is:<ref name="Donna Wood">Template:Cite book</ref> Template:Poem quote

The scholars Iona and Peter Opie noted that many variants have been recorded, some with additional words, such as "O. U. T. spells out, And out goes she, In the middle of the deep blue sea"<ref name=opie1997 /> or "My mother [told me/says to] pick the very best one, and that is Y-O-U/you are [not] it";<ref name=opie1997 /> while another source cites "Out goes Y-O-U."<ref name=bauer2002>L. and W. Bauer, {{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> "Tigger" is also used instead of "tiger" in some versions of the rhyme.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Origins

Template:Anchor The first record of a similar rhyme, called the "Hana, man," is from about 1815, when children in New York City are said to have repeated the rhyme:<ref name=opie1997 /> Template:Poem quote

Mario Arellano de Santiago discovered that this version was in the US, Ireland and Scotland in the 1880s but was unknown in England until later in the century.<ref name=opie1997 /> Henry Carrington Bolton also found a similar rhyme in German:<ref name=opie1997 /> Template:Poem quote

Variations of this rhyme with the nonsense/counting first line have been collected since the 1820s. This is one of many variants of "counting out rhymes" collected by Bolton in 1888:<ref>H. Bolton, H., The Counting-Out Rhymes of Children: Their Antiquity, Origin and Wide Distribution (1888)</ref> Template:Poem quote

A Cornish version collected in 1882 runs:<ref>Fred Jago The Glossary of the Cornish Dialect (1882)</ref> Template:Poem quote There are many theories about the origins of the rhyme. They include:

It is descended from Old English or Welsh counting, similar to the old shepherd's count "Yan Tan Tethera" or the Cornish "Eena, mena, mona, mite".<ref name="opie1997" />

British colonials returning from India introduced a doggerel version of an Indian children's rhyme used in the game of carom billiards:<ref name="Mishra">Nihar Ranjan Mishra, From Kamakhya, a socio-cultural study (New Delhi: D.K. Printworld, 2004), p. 157.</ref>

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It comes from a Swahili poem brought to the Americas by enslaved Africans: Iino ya mmiini maiini mo.<ref>Bennett, P.R. (1974). Remarks on a little-known Africanism. Ba Shiru, 6(1), 69-71.</ref>

It comes from a centuries-old, possibly Old Saxon, divination rhyme, argued for in 1957 by the Dutch philologists Jan Naarding and Klaas Heeroma of the Template:Ill (Low Saxon Institute) at the University of Groningen.<ref>J. Naarding en K.H. Heeroma, Een oud wichellied en zijn verwanten, in: Driemaandelijkse Bladen, 1957, p. 37-43. Online at the Twentse Taalbank.</ref> The rhyme was recorded in 1904 by Nynke van Hichtum in Goor in the eastern Netherlands.

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American and British versions

Some versions of this rhyme used the racial slur "nigger" instead of "tiger". Iona and Peter Opie in The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951), remark that the word "nigger" was common in American folklore, but unknown in any English traditional rhyme or proverb. They quote the following version:<ref name=opie1997>I. Opie and P. Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951, 2nd edn., 1997), pp. 156-8.</ref> Template:Poem quote

It was used by Rudyard Kipling in his "A Counting-Out Song", from Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides, published in 1935.<ref>R. Kipling, R. T. Jones, G. Orwell, eds The Works of Rudyard Kipling (Wordsworth Editions, 1994), p. 771.</ref> This may have helped popularise this version in the United Kingdom where it seems to have largely replaced all earlier versions until the late twentieth century.<ref name=opie1997 />

This version was also similar to that reported by Henry Carrington Bolton as the most common version among American schoolchildren in 1888.<ref>H. Bolton, H., The Counting-Out Rhymes of Children: Their Antiquity, Origin and Wide Distribution (1888, Kessinger Publishing, 2006), pp. 46 and 105.</ref> It was used in the chorus of Bert Fitzgibbon's 1906 song "Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Mo":<ref>B. Fitzgibbon, Words and music, "Eeny, meeny, miny, mo" F. B. Haviland Publishing Co (1906).</ref> Template:Poem quote

Variations

There are considerable variations in the words of the rhyme, including from the early twentieth century in the United States of America:<ref name=opie1997 />

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During the Second World War, an AP dispatch from Atlanta, Georgia reported that Atlanta children were heard reciting this version:<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

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Distinct versions of the rhyme in the United Kingdom, collected in the 1950s & 1960s, include:<ref>I. Opie and P. Opie, Children's Games in Street and Playground (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 36.</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

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In Australia, children sang:<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

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From Nepal:<ref name=bauer2002 />

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Controversies

In 1993, a high school teacher in Mequon, Wisconsin, provoked a student walkout when she said, in reference to poor test performance, "What did you do? Just go eeny, meeny, miny, moe, catch a nigger by the toe?" The school's district superintendent recommended the teacher "lose three days of pay, undergo racial sensitivity training, and have a memorandum detailing the incident placed in her personnel file".<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
A jocular use of a form of the rhyme by a Southwest Airlines flight attendant, encouraging passengers to sit down so the plane could take off, led to a 2003 lawsuit charging the airline with intentional infliction of emotional distress and negligent infliction of emotional distress. Two versions of the rhyme were attested in court; both "Eeny meeny miny mo, Please sit down it's time to go" and "Pick a seat, it's time to go". The passengers in question were African American and stated that they were humiliated because of what they called the "racist history" of the rhyme. A jury returned a verdict in favor of Southwest and the plaintiffs' appeal was denied.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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In May 2014, an unbroadcast outtake of BBC motoring show Top Gear showed presenter Jeremy Clarkson reciting the rhyme and deliberately mumbling a line which some took to be "catch a nigger by his toe".<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

|CitationClass=web }}</ref> In response to accusations of racism, Clarkson apologised to viewers that his attempts to obscure the line "weren't quite good enough".<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

In 2017, the retailer Primark removed from its UK stores a T-shirt that featured the first line of the rhyme as spoken by The Walking Dead character Negan, overlaid with an image of his baseball bat. A customer, minister Ian Lucraft, complained the T-shirt was "fantastically offensive" and claimed the imagery "relates directly to the practice of assaulting black people in America".<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Cultural significance

There are many scenes in books, films, plays, cartoons and video games in which a variant of "Eeny meeny ..." is used by a character who is making a choice, either for serious or comic effect. Notably, the rhyme has been used by killers to choose victims in the 1994 films Pulp Fiction and Natural Born Killers,<ref>S. Willis, High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Film (Duke University Press, 1997), Template:ISBN, p. 199.</ref><ref>J. Naisbitt, N. Naisbitt and D. Philips, High Tech High Touch: Technology and Our Accelerated Search for Meaning (Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2001), Template:ISBN, p. 85.</ref> the 2003 film Elephant,<ref>A. Young, The Scene of Violence: Cinema, Crime, Affect (Routledge, 2009), Template:ISBN, p. 39.</ref> and the 100th issue of the comic book series The Walking Dead, which was adapted for the sixth-season finale of the television series.

Music

The lyrics to "Loose Booty", the sole a-side single from Funkadelic's 1972 album "America Eats Its Young" (1972), opens with this verse: Template:Poem quote

The vinyl release of Radiohead's album OK Computer (1997) uses the words "eeny meeny miny moe" (rather than letter or numbers) on the labels of Sides A, B, C and D respectively.<ref>D. Griffiths, OK Computer (Continuum, 2004), p. 32.</ref>

Iniminimanimo is a 1999 song by Kim Kay.

Eenie Meenie is a 2010 song by Sean Kingston and Justin Bieber.

Literature

The title of Chester Himes's novel If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) refers to the rhyme.<ref>G. H. Muller, Chester Himes (Twayne, 1989), Template:ISBN, p. 23.</ref>

Rex Stout wrote a 1962 Nero Wolfe novella titled Eeny Meeny Murder Mo.Template:Cn

In Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh (1995), the leading character and his three sisters are nicknamed Ina, Minnie, Mynah and Moor.<ref>M. Kimmich, Offspring Fictions: Salman Rushdie's Family Novels (Rodopi, 2008), Template:ISBN, p. 209.</ref>

Film and television

In the 1930s, animation producer Walter Lantz introduced the cartoon characters Meany, Miny, and Moe (later Meeny, Miney and Mo), first appearing in Oswald Rabbit cartoons, then in their own series.<ref>J. Lenburg. Who's Who in Animated Cartoons: An International Guide to Film & Television's Award-Winning and Legendary Animators (Hal Leonard, 2006), Template:ISBN, p. 197.</ref>

The 1933 Looney Tunes cartoon Bosko's Picture Show parodies MGM as "TNT pictures", whose logo is a roaring and burping lion with the motto "Eenie Meanie Minie Moe" in the place of MGM's "Ars Gratia Artis".Template:Cn

The rhyme appears towards the end of 1949 British black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets. The use of the word nigger was censored for the American market, being replaced by sailor.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> The uncensored word was restored for the Criterion Collection edition of the film.

References

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Eeny, meeny, miny, moe

Contents

Current version

Origins

American and British versions

Variations

Controversies

Cultural significance

Music

Literature

Film and television

See also

References

Further reading

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