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A section for all you budding etymologists where each week the origin of a word or phrase is investigated.
This week it is..... Eeny, meeny, miny, mo
The first line of a popular children’s counting rhyme.
Of all of the phrases and idioms in the English language
‘eeny, meenie, miny, mo’ must be the one with the widest
variety of spellings. Added to that, as far back as the
19th century there have been variants of the rhyme
which are so dissimilar to our current version as to be
scarcely recognisable - ‘Hana, mana, mona, mike’ (from
New York) and ‘Eetern, feetern, peeny, pump’ (from
Scotland) and many of these now have local variants
and words added from other languages.
What lies behind this variability is that throughout the
19th century the rhyme spread from different parts of the
UK to every playground in the English-speaking world,
but by word of mouth rather than on paper. There never
was an accepted definitive version, so the children who
used the rhyme were very happy to substitute their own
words as the mood took them.
The best known version of the rhyme is the one that is
now widely derided as insulting, especially in the USA,
which we won’t reprint here. A more acceptable version
has now established itself:
Eeny, meeny, miny, mo,
Catch the tiger/monkey/baby by the toe.
If it hollers[USA]/screams[UK] let him go,
Eeny, meeny, miny, mo.
The rhyme is used by groups of children as a way of
selecting someone to take a role that is different from
the others. As difference is unwelcome to children,
the formula had to be sufficiently unpredictable to be
accepted as fair. A leader takes the counting role and,
in the rhythm of the rhyme, points to each child in turn.
The last line is often topped off with a short emphasized
‘You are It!’ or ‘O, U, T spells out!’, which all the children
join in with. Sometimes the child pointed to at the end
of one count is the one selected - to be ‘It’ in a game of
hide and seek, for example. In more important choices
- selecting who has to ask that grumpy man down the
road for their ball back - the one pointed to last drops
out and the formula is repeated several times until only
one is left.
‘Eeny, meeny, miny, mo’ is certainly a strange line, so does
it mean anything and does curiosity about its origin lead
us anywhere? Well, as is so often the case in etymology,
yes and no. There is a similarity between the words of the
phrase and some of the numerals in pre-English Celtic
and Cumbrian languages; for example, the oral tradition
of the English coastal town of Yarmouth voices ‘one,
two, three, four’ as ‘ina, mina, tethera, methera’. Also,
the word for ‘one’ in Welsh, Cornish, Irish and Breton
is, respectively, ‘un’ (pronounced ‘een’), ‘ouyn’, ‘aon’ and
‘unan’ - all of them sounding not unlike ‘een’ or ‘eeny’.
The age of the phrase is uncertain. It first began to be
written down in the 19th century - the scholarly journal
Notes and Queries published this in the February 1855
edition:
“The following are used in the United States for the
selection of a tagger...
Eeny, meeny, moany, mite,
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