If it doesn’t seem to make sense, even in the gibberish Eeny Meeny world, that you’d grab a carnivorous cat’s toe and expect the tiger to do the hollering, remember that in both England and America, children until recently said “Catch a nigger by the toe.” The nigger-to-tiger shift is one of the rare instances where changes in the rhyme happen in such an explicit and pointed fashion. In the canonical Eeny Meeny, “tiger” is standard in the second line, but this is a relatively recent revision. And I’d be remiss in omitting “One potato, two potato, three potato, four / Five potato, six potato, seven potato, more,” which flirts with replacing eeny meeny as the counting-out gold standard in the United States. “Ippetty, sipetty, ippetty sap, ipetty, sipetty, kinella kinack” (Scotland). “Eenty, teenty, ithery, bithery” (England).
“Hinty, minty, cuty, corn, wire, briar, limber lock” (United States). Not only are there hoards of Eeny Meenies, there are just as many counting-out schemes that share the same DNA. In the fifties and sixties, the formidable husband-and-wife folklorists Iona and Peter Opie recorded hundreds of varieties in England and America, including, to name just a few: What we do know is that once Eeny Meeny appeared on the scene, it was everywhere. But where did eeny meeny come from? Kipling tells us that “Eenee, Meenee, Mainee, and Mo / Were the First Big Four of the Long Ago,” but that’s not such a good lead. It turns up in strange places: in Pulp Fiction, in the Great Vermont Corn Maze, in Justin Bieber songs. No one knows what eeny or meeny might mean everybody knows what “eeny meeny” means. “Eeny meeny miny mo” is one of those rhymes that’s ingrained in our cultural limbic system-once we hear the first two syllables, the rest unspools whether we want it to or not. I'm old enough to remember the time before the replacements were made.A Works Progress Administration poster for the Cedar Central Apartments in Cleveland, Ohio, ca.
The rhyme still evokes the N-word, and no amount of beer will wash that down. He said it would be “a huge stretch” now to make the connection.
Sullivan thinks that time and the wording change in the rhyme have been enough to disassociate it from its racist past. The N-word in the mid-1970s was “replaced by tigger, tiger, spider, beggar, etc.” the book said. Then the verse was “Eena, meena, mina, mo, Catch a nigger by his toe If he squeals, let him go, Eena, meena, mina, moe.” The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes traced the rhyme in America to the 1850s when slavery was at its zenith. What also was disturbing about the offensive Boulevard billboard was that Sullivan said company officials knew the origin of the ad and used it anyway. Mith, where did you get that quote from? The op-ed in the OP states something different: I know we've discussed this on these boards before, probably back in 2004.
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