Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Eeny Meeny Miny Moe

Episode Date: September 25, 2023

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why "eeny meeny miny moe" is secretly incredibly fascinating. Special guests: Ella Hubber and Caroline Roper.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the new SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Eenie, meenie, minie, moe. Known for and famous for catching a tiger by his toe. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why eenie, meenie, minie, moe is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm very much not alone. I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden. Katie, hello. Hello. And she's saying that quick because we are so excited about two wonderful guests joining us today. Ella Hubber and Caroline Roper both hold advanced scientific degrees. They also do wonderful scientific communication all over the internet, including on their podcast, Let's Learn Everything, a wonderful Maximum Fun podcast,

our buddies. Welcome to the show. Ella, say hello first. Hello. Thank you for having us. I'm so excited to be here. Caroline, your turn. Say hello. Hello.

Same again. I'm just like so buzzing for this. May I ask, what flavor of science is your specialties? Oh, such a good question. Yeah. You go, Caroline. Yours is more interesting. Thanks.

So I have a master's in biodiversity conservation. I mostly focused on working with amphibians in that time, but I'm currently working for a bird charity here in the UK. So I'm a bit all over the place with the animals. I'm a fan. Hold on. A bird charity. Katie here is at ProBirdRights on Twitter.

Are you both just working for BirdRights all of the time? Of course not. Conclusion. I was too, like, honest with that answer, apparently. I was just like, yeah, totally. Katie's more sneaky about it. Awesome. And Ella more sneaky about it. Awesome. And Ella, how about you?

Yeah, my flavor of science is biomedical science. I did a PhD in stem cell biology. Yeah, okay. So I love the minutia of the human body. Very cool. I am a doctor and everyone should refer to me as such. Okay, because I've been having this knee thing. Do you know anything about that?

Yeah, I know everything about that. Thank you. I'm not going to say any more. I just wanted the validation. I find that whenever it rains, I get this twingy feeling in my stem cells. And I'm trying to figure out why that is. Really, really common. Really common. Yeah, that's also cool. And also, Katie and I had an absolutely wonderful time guesting on your podcast with y'all and also Tom Lum, who's so great. It's such a good show. I

hope people go hear it if they have not already. It's fantastic. Yeah. On that, I'll just say, if you haven't heard Let's Learn Everything, you should come over and listen to the episode that Alex and Katie guested on, which was about birds in space. It was wonderful. Birds in space. And produced one of my all-time favorite videos of the quails in space to like operatic music. Amazing.

I don't know if you've heard the like, ask a man how often he thinks about the Roman Empire trend that's been going on TikTok right now. I feel like quails in space is my Roman Empire. Like every day I'm thinking about that video. I think about those zero grab little chicks pretty constantly too. Yeah. And this episode today, it will get very scientific toward the end and be possibly one of our least scientific episodes at the beginning.

So I thought that would be very fun for this group. I like it kind of a science gradient. Yeah, it'll increasingly, at the end, so science. We crank up the science slowly, but surely. Like frogs in a pot of water. Exactly. Is it frogs you put in or crabs? It's frogs.

It's frogs. It's frogs. Crabs frogs. It's frogs. Crabs just die. Unless you're making a gumbo, then I think it is crabs. Depends what your end result is, really. And this topic, many of our topics are selected by listeners and they have selected eeny, meeny, miny, moe as a topic. The whole children's rhyme. And thank you to listener Tongue Surgery on the Discord.

They go by Tongue Surgery. Ew. Sorry, but ew. For that fun idea. But we always start by our relationship to the topic or opinion of it. So Caroline or Ella, either of you can start. But I thought I'd start with you. How do you feel about eeny, meeny, miny, moe?

start but but i thought i'd start with you how do you feel about eenie meenie miney mo what i know about you know you know i eenie meenie miney mo is you use it for picking things right between two things normally or a few things but you can always do it so that you can select what you want you can always extend the rhyme for as long as possible eenie meenie miney mo catch a tiger by its toe if it hollers let it go you are not it oh but maybe you are it i'm just going to keep on going until i get my choice also there's there's shenanigans you can do with sort of doing a little bit of a double point with a word i've never trusted it it is not a fair and equitable system of selecting i've always hated it i've always been suspicious of it um yeah yeah exactly maybe this is good because like if you're

struggling to choose between something it validates all of those feelings if you're disappointed about your choice then you're like oh then i must go for this one. If you're feeling positive, then it's all worked out fine. I just remember on the playground when we were using it for games and stuff, I always demanded a recount because I didn't trust it. This is so validating. I felt the exact same way as a kid, but I never talked to anybody about it. I just thought this was like the system. So you can't complain. We were all going through this horrible internal torment as children, not being selected for Meanie Meanie Miney Moe and it's finally coming to the surface. Is this all just because we weren't picked? Is that what it is? Are we all doing okay?

This is like group therapy. It's our first encounter with nepotism, right? You have some kind of system that pretends to be objective. Then you realize it is not. And one can bend the rules of the system to select their preferred candidate. And that's, you know, I think that it's something to learn as a child of like, wait a minute, you can pretend like a system is equitable and yet it is not. Yeah. That is a good point.

But you don't know how to express that as a child. Except going, it's not fair. It's not fair. Life's not fair. I'm being told that as like a six yearyear-old and it's like no this is wrong right as kids we just complain we can't be like mother father consider the topic of justice like we don't we don't have any profound ways of expressing all this the other thing about eeny meeny miny moe is that it feels like it makes no sense to me

because do tigers do tigers have toes is that what those digits are like i guess definitely have toes or are they fingers or are they just claws they've got toe beans and therefore they have toes oh they do have they do yeah have you tried to grab a tiger's toe beans i feel like like that's not going to end well for you. In addition to it being unethical, I like having my face arranged as it is currently. Like being attached to my head, namely. That's so valid. So this week, if folks know the show, there is usually a stats and numbers section.

This topic is kind of not statistical or numerical, really. And so even though it's a counting rhyme, we're going to do just huge takeaways and really explore all those questions of why is it about tigers and what does any of the words mean? Because it turns out there's like theories about it in folklore and more. Oh, OK. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. So we're starting with mega takeaway number one. Eenie, meenie, miney, moe has unclear origins,

probably rooted in a centuries-old tradition of counting out rhymes. Ah. Like the exact specifics are unclear, but it turns out there's about a bajillion, I guess you'd call them lyrics. Like the words vary a whole bunch over time. Yeah. And it was all basically in order to do counting out a rhythm with words that feel fun.

Hmm. Yeah. It doesn't surprise me that it's not, we don't know the origin, because I feel like these things are passed, they're passed in the playground from person to person. And if you're saying centuries old, then how could we possibly trace this properly? But do you have any examples of other versions of it then? Yeah, there's some fun, weird folklorist work. And this is, I said this was like the unscientific end. Very few people have studied this topic. So we're really drawing on

one of the only people to say, I am an academic scholar and I'm looking at eeny, meeny, miny, moe, which is thrilling to me. It's weird. I am a rhymeologist. Imagine the title of that PhD thesis. Yeah, the key sources here are a piece for the Paris Review by poet and researcher Adrian Raphael and then additional coverage by NPR. The main scholarly study of Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Moe is by an English couple who were married folklorists named Iona and Peter Opie. Adorable. They sound so cute in love and very nerdy. I can imagine the sweaters that they wear and they look adorable in my brain i have to tell you guys a

very quick anecdote here because please reminded me i i met a couple they were a kind of older couple who that they were both archaeologists and uh they did it in their free time they had studied archaeology but they didn't but that in their free time they went out to a quarry near where they lived and dig and dug around for fossils together they found a big like reserve of like 400 million year old fossils together wow just in like as like a couple's hobby that they were doing we have power couple brushing together they were so nice imagine the patience too like you have to really be in love to be able to like sit next to each other using little instruments and brushes like with yeah with like archaeology it's just like like brush brush brush brush brush brush like for hours and hours and hours because it's's, you know, you have to be careful. Yeah. And these are microscopic fossils as well. Oh my God. It's

even, and I went back to their house and their house is just full of boxes on every surface of fossils of these like ancient fossils. It was amazing. And they were so fun and cool. So I think there's something about like these niche studies that brings in like strange individuals like this together. I mean that in the best way. Yeah, that this is a very sweet thing. Like they spent their career compiling the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. You know what I mean? Like that's a that's a fun thing to do.

For them it's a fun thing to do. Yes. Yeah, not for me. I can do. But their work plus other folklorist work, it gives us a general origin theory for eeny, meeny, miny, moe, especially because when the Opie's sought out local versions, they found dozens of variations, like that same rhythm, but all kinds of different words. And so we're going to go through different varieties from the 50s and 60s. Here comes the first one. Hana, mana, mona, mike.

Barcelona, bona, strike. Hair, wear, frown, vannak. Herico, werico, we, wo, whack. Wow. I like that version. It's a barcelona in there too yeah the city the city of barcelona comes up a lot in these for some reason and i think it's just nonsense i think people just like the sound of barcelona yeah it is a good sounding city that is more a more fun version though i think yeah another one here is ina mina mina mo cracka fina fina fo

up a nucha papa tucha yeah ring ding dang doh up a nucha papa tucha oh i like that one it's got it's a little bit jazzy isn't it it? It is. Maybe like a bit scatty. A little bit ska. Yeah, a little bit ska. A little bit ska. Skibbity doodah. If listeners just want to keep rewinding this part and like vibe out to it, you know, you're welcome. It's cool.

I just like that. I also invite remixes of that one. I do like that sometimes humans just like to mash words together. It's not that the meanings of the words make any sense together. We just like the mouth sounds that come out of us when they're smooshed together like that. Just kind of having an interesting mouth salad of words. Yeah. Don't you think it feels satisfying in your mouth to do that it's like yeah yeah for people who can't see me right now i'm just moving my

jaw around a lot but in a satisfying way it really is too bad that they can't see yeah i as i say these i feel like i'm sort of hogging it i'm gonna drop another one in the chat here and if anybody wants to do the next one, go for it. Because it's fun. Can we do it all three? Let's try to do it all at once. The delay might not help. Bad idea.

No, we can totally do it. I'm confident in this. I'm going to go three, two, one. And then we try to do it all at once. And it's going to sound great. Okay. Ready? Yeah, cool. Three, two, one. go three two one and then we try to do it all at once it's gonna sound great okay ready three two one yay i gave up halfway through you guys all sounded perfectly in sync Sticks Stacks Stone Dead Yay

I gave up Halfway through You guys all Sounded perfectly In sync to me I assume that we're All having the same Issue there

Oh We'll fix it in post It'll all be fixed In post I don't like This one as much Yeah It's sort of a

Shopping list Eggs, butter, cheese, bread Yeah Sticks, stacks, stone, dead. Yeah, it does have stone dead in there with cheese and bread, which is an unpleasant association. So, Alex, was there something to, these all seem like kind of keeping time, counting rhymes. Wow. Yeah.

Yeah. Were these used to kind of like keep track of time periods or were they used to count things? Like did it have a practical application? Yeah. Is it like the number of beats in it? So it was just like one, two, three, four, eeny, meeny, miny, moe. And once you've like hit the end of the song, you know, you've counted a certain number of things. That's my initial thought. Like doing a one, a two, a skibbity-dibbity-doo. Yeah. That was lovely.

Right. I forgot to say all three of you are wonderful science communicators and professional scat people. Oh, yeah. No, that, yeah, Caroline, that theory is the Opie's theory. Yeah. Like this, this didn't start as a randomization thing. This probably didn't even start with children. It's probably something that started with regular working people.

And in quoting the Paris Review here, Eenie Meenie traces its ancestry to an ancient British counting system, the Anglo-Cumric score. Across northern England and southern Scotland, a set of numerals exists for specific ritual purposes. Shepherds use it to count sheep, women to keep track of knitting, fishermen to harvest their catch. Peasants knew the system for centuries as Yantan Tethera, end quote. peasants knew the system for centuries as yantan tethera end quote so for two things there british people what are you doing too complicated unnecessary just count oh no you see i firmly disagree because like i'm i'm a big crocheter and every day i question my ability to count because of crochet big thing here maybe maybe a song like this could help me catch my stitches as I'm going. Fine.

Rather than relying on my ability to do any maths. Yeah, no, I totally agree. I'm also a crocheter. And when I'm counting the stitches, I can't just count them. I have to count them by twos. And what's really interesting is I feel like it becomes a song in my head, like it has a rhythm. So if I go beyond 10 and 20, then it's like 32, four, six, eight, and then I go for, you know, 40. So it's like, because otherwise, the added syllables are too much, it messes with the rhythm of it. So like having that rhythm, that musicality of it really helps me keep track of what I'm counting, which I think is so fascinating about the human brain that we aren't necessarily great at just keeping huge numbers in our head or memorizing long strings.

But what we can do is memorize things or strings of information once we've formed an association with that information, whether that's in rhyme, whether it's a mnemonic device. It's like we are really good at taking a lot of information, compacting it into like a nested little box and then just remembering that box. OK. You know what? You convinced me, Katie. That's pretty good. It kind of reminds me of when you do CPR, you're supposed to do it to like staying alive.

Yes. On the beat. So I guess I do know that and I would use that. Just quickly, Alex, what did you say? It was Anglo what? Anglo-C cumric score and cum cumric is my attempt to pronounce c-y-m-r-i-c you might know better being in wales what's going on there it's what yeah it's well that's the gold welsh yeah

cumric is probably okay come come big yeah wales and Welsh is Cymru, so there you go. And Welsh is Cymraeg. Yeah, we really don't get a lot of exposure to Welsh in the US. We miss out on it. No, very few people do. Honestly, neither do we. I've just started Welsh lessons, which is why I'm thinking about it. Really?

No way. I didn't know you were doing that that's really cool yeah i just like it because it sounds like you named a dog rick and you're like come rick it's a weird name for a dog the welsh people will be deeply offended actually let me show you quickly i have this book teach your cat welsh wow oh i am so not shocked by this book existing or by you having it that's fantastic how do you say in welsh spit with a welsh accent oh i was gonna say you just put like lots of Ys in there for no reason. Yeah.

Well, the I would be a Y, yeah. Pice, pice, pice, pice, pice. Yeah, yeah. And this really comes from, if this theory is right, sort of the centre of the island of Britain there. Like top of england edge of wales bottom of scotland and and yeah apparently they think there's a potential earliest version which is a slightly different rhythm too but it starts with yantan tethera i've heard that really in what context i've heard someone do something like that.

I think it was probably someone Scottish. That would make sense, yeah. As like a counting beat thing. Oh, okay. Could be still around. And all these versions apparently have still been around. We're a little bit of a monoculture now in 2023, and eeny, meeny, miny, moe is more and more common.

monoculture now in 2023, and eeny, meeny, miny, moe is more and more common, but the oldest version went yan, tan, tethera, methera, pimp, sethera, leathera, hethera, dovera, dick, yandick, tandick, tetherdick, metherdick, bumfit, yanna bumfit, tanna bumfit, tethera bumfit, pethera bumfit, tether a bum fit pether a bum fit giggart now you're just naming harry potter characters yeah or star wars yeah because it it sounds like it kind of sounds like counting with numbers and then like similar endings like 9 19 29 you get that same little ending each time. I say because pimp is five in Welsh and that's the fifth thing you said. So this is not Welsh counting, but I wonder if there's some like root there. Sort of a schmilch, a schmilch language.

Guys, tag yourself. I'm bum fit. I'm meather, for sure. I was vibing with Giggert, for sure. Giggert's a good one. Definitely a Giggert. Giggert really swings in at the end there. I agree.

It really does. Ella, this is amazing. You're in Wales and are learning Welsh this time so well. That's going great. Because Eeny, Meeny, Mighty,, moe or yententethereh or any variation, it's both really rooted in people's language and then outside it. It can be, you know, centuries ago, a lot of people who are not literate, who maybe have little or no education are learning this thing. And it's just because the counting is fun and then that has even let it kind of

cross over into other places with other languages apparently there was a french version that begins and then a danish version beginning i'm sure i'm not pronouncing that right but just the activity of the counting it makes it sort of independent of language, even though people will agree on words for it. Yeah. My German teacher, when I was learning German at school, taught me the German version of eenie meenie miney moe. And it is still like, not accurate, but it is still in my head. And I can maybe say it. meaning my name mr oh no can i remember any meaning my name mr something's up by the kister you know what no i'm not even gonna try it but yeah that that any meaning my name mr part stayed in my head forever which i

think is really funny that like it's so similar to ours like it travels that language barrier yeah it sounds so much like peter peter pumpkin eater had a wife but couldn't keep her. Oh. Yeah. This is such a human activity. We're like, how do I just speak in rhythms and feel nice about it and get that vibe? Yeah. Yeah.

Why do we love that so much? We're not birds. Not all of us. But this is what's really interesting. And Carolineoline maybe you can back me up on this but like birds are i think in terms of their linguistic abilities are one of the animals that are the most similar to humans like even including primates birds love rhythm they love rhythm and humans love rhythm it's such an interesting thing that seems to come from having a linguistic structure oh that's interesting you've just made me think of like talking about humans as a whole and just you've made me think about how difficult it can be to make some of the sounds that we make which why a lot of animals don't make these noises why

birds can be pretty good at it because they can mimic those sounds but also like across different languages there are sounds that like people from certain countries who've learned certain languages can make that say us as english speakers wouldn't be able to make and i wonder then how different these like rhythm based songs rhymes would then be in other countries as well you know yeah what i want to know is a cosa the end of the clicking language which i can't pronounce properly that what it's actually called but that i i wonder what if they have a version of mini mini mini mo how that would go that right yeah so interesting if this is something that has cropped up in different places you know do their versions of it sound similar to ours or are they completely different and possibly something that we wouldn't be able to replicate

oh that would be just i just googled cosa in a mini money mo and i got there aren't any good matches for your search on Google. What? Surely. You've gone too far, Ella. You guys have a Discord server, right? We do. Yeah, we have a Discord.

If anyone finds anything on that, could you let me know? Could you let us know? Because I want to know so much. Yeah, link in the episode description to join the discord and yeah any any are welcome i'm gonna link all our sources this week because they have the various languages this has been recorded in and then also english and the internet is kind of monoculturing this rhyme but in only some languages these have been recorded because you know there's only a few scientific or scholarly people bothering to say, I should study eeny, meeny, miny, moe and record

it for pastoral. Like a lot of people are saying, no, I'm going to split atoms and do amazing things. And though this is cool too. Yeah. I like that there's some kind of perceived branching of career choices of I can either study eeny, meeny, miny, moe or split atoms. There's nothing, nothing else. Nothing in the middle there. Yeah. It's like Robert eeny, meeny, miny, Moppenheimer. Arguably, we would live in a safer world if he'd just studied nursery rhymes.

That was great. And I said this was a mega takeaway, this theory of it comes from regular people counting as they go about their day. There's also two caveats with that. One is that the Opie's work is kind of just one set of work. We're just lacking a lot of other scholars looking at this. But the other caveat is that the Internet can often have myths about things like children's rhymes. And one of the biggest ones is Ring Around the Rosie. I'm going to link the Library of Congress debunking the idea that that has to do with the plague.

debunking the idea that that has to do with the plague for a lot of reasons, but mainly the huge variety of words that can be for the song Ring Around the Rosie. We think that's just people on the internet, like inventing something fun sounding and not actually what's going on there. That doesn't surprise me, but I was so convinced that that was what it was. I feel like I've been told that for so long me too i feel like remembering learning about that being a huge thing for me and my peers have been like oh my goodness what that's what yeah that nursery rhyme's all about and now i'm like having a bit of a moment and knowing that it's not what that's about i feel a little bit disappointed. Betrayed. I guess I just kind of chucked us into that. Yeah. Next, you're going to tell me that Three Blind Mice was not about the War of the

Roses. The Library of Congress says that the main reason we think Ring Around the Rosie is not plague stuff is that there's tons of other versions of the lyrics. In one version, everyone gets back up after falling down. Lots of other versions leave out words that have been interpreted as physical signs of plague. And most of them seem to bring up rosies or posies in a literal way where it's just flowers. So you have to like really drill down to one extremely specific version and post about it on Reddit a lot to like get to the idea that it's about the plague. But I was totally taught that by either school friends or the Internet and had that same experience. I was like, whoa. And so the point with Eenie Meenie Miney Moe is I think this OP theory feels solid because it's pretty loose and not over claiming. Right.

You know, but there's some over claims about children's rhymes online. Well, if they're ring around the rosy thing, I think it's interesting because I think there's this tendency to when we look at like horrifying things in the past, we imagine that, well, people were used to death. They were used to horrible things. Like even the children would sing about it. So it's not so bad because people just kind of expected things to be terrible and they were jaded. And I think that's kind of wishful thinking. I think like this idea that like, well, people really didn't get attached to their children because they were expecting them to die. And I don't think any of that's true. I think it was just really painful and hard to be a human back during the plague.

So I think that sometimes we try to come up with ideas of like, well, human psychology was just different back then. And it's like, I don't think it was so different necessarily. Obviously, the culture was so different necessarily. Obviously the culture was very different, but I think that like people going through something horrible, like a plague, I think that they probably really took it very seriously and suffered a lot. And I think that some of the myths that we come up with about the plague is an attempt to kind of make ourselves feel better about like, well, yes, it seemed like a horrible time, but I think people, they were just used to people dropping down dead. So, so much so that the children were

singing songs about it and maybe that's our attempt to cope. Yeah. That's such a good point. I think that all ties back into the way that we often diminish like the capabilities, The way that we often diminish like the capabilities, either emotional or intelligence wise of human beings in history. Ultimately, modern humans have been the same in kind of emotional and brain capacity for thousands of years. And it's like, it's kind of like with pyramids, you know, like ancient Egyptians ability to build pyramids. You say, how could they have possibly done that?

Aliens! Must have been aliens. Yeah, exactly. It's got to be the aliens. No, the exact same way we would have thought to do it if we didn't have the same technology we have now, which is possible. And it's like that kind of thing, I think, applies there as well. Yeah.

Yeah, that reminds me of there used to be these recipes for medicine, essentially. And I wish I could remember her name, but she was a recipe for something to cure like a stye in your eye, like a bacterial growth. It was like an acidic mixture that had like onion and various things in it. And it also included like saying a certain religious prayer. And the way it was viewed was like, well, they're superstitious. So they think saying this prayer will cause some kind of magic to happen with the medication. But this researcher believed that saying the prayer was just a method of timing it because you don't have a stopwatch back in ancient times.

And by saying this prayer, you are basically timing the chemical reaction. I think they tried to like recreate this medication using the methods. And it was something that actually did have some antibacterial properties. Not as good as modern medicine, but it seemed to have some impact on that bacteria. That's amazing. That's kind of my favorite thing to learn about this saying that it was was useful to not just children and it was for everybody when it started out. That's just we think of it as such a kid thing. And I think it's mainly because adults all have clocks now and just like silly reasons.

But it was for everybody when it started out and for regular people. It's such an adult thing to get your first clock. I remember on my 18th birthday i was presented with this beautiful clock it's like you're a woman now i still i still don't own a clock i have never owned a clock in my life actually saying that the only clock i have in my flat right now is owned by my landlord and i have to leave it here when I move out so actually landlords are the keepers of clocks I didn't know I was talking I'm not an adult I don't own a clock I didn't know I was talking to a couple of children

I can't believe I've never owned a clock. Isn't that a weird thing to realise? Ella, you own two cats and you don't have a clock. They can't tell the time. It doesn't matter. Actually, Meow Mix. Meow Mix is a song that cats use to tell time. What? Meow Mix?

The Meow Mix song. Oh, I like chicken, I want liver. Meow Mix, Meow Mix, please deliver. Yeah, exactly. I was about to wonder if America's greatest cultural work had progressed to the UK. The Meow Mix song. Our greatest cultural export. Well, folks, that's our first mega takeaway.

And we have a couple more takeaways to get into after a short break. Stick around. We'll be back in two or three eeny, meeny, miny, moes. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening

to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience, one you have no choice but to embrace, because, yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday One you have no choice but to embrace because, yes, listening is mandatory.

The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. Folks, we are back. Me and Katie are joined, as we said, by two of our wonderful friends from the Let's Learn Everything podcast, Ella Hubber and Caroline Roper. We are also back with two more takeaways. The last one is very scientific, but this next one here, fair warning to folks, somewhat bleak. This is not usually a bleak podcast, but

this topic that folks selected, it turns out there's a dark chapter in American history with it. Oh, no. I was worried about this. I know what it is. Yeah. I think I might also know. Well, no, I know, like, very surface level.

Yeah, I mean, what you're about to talk about. Yeah. Yeah. I had a vague possibly, is that part of it? When people first suggested the topic. And we'll get into it. Takeaway number two. The main version of eeny, meeny, miny, moe in the United States was super racist for many decades.

And that also got spread worldwide, partly by Rudyard Kipling. Rudyard? I didn't know the Kipling part, but the... He strikes again. The super basics here, folks, is for a lot of the 1800s and 1900s, the most common U.S. version of this featured the N-word instead of tiger.

It has changed at some point in a way we can't track to being not that horrible thing anymore. But it's worth like being aware of this especially because a few people pass it around still oh yeah i know people who are in their 50s and 60s who are still using this version of the rhyme oh the one with the episode prevalent here yeah it was definitely exported around the world. Like I heard that as a child. Yikes. Yeah.

And it was, it was almost definitely coined by the United States. So, so we also think British folks develop just the innocent counting rhyme with various Barcelonas and so on. And then the United States did this thing with it. I wish Miamics was our only cultural export. Right. You hit it here, folks.

British people, never racist. Never racist. Just never, never, never. Don't look into that. Don't look into it. Don't fact check that one. So was adding the tiger in it the attempt to neutralize the racism? Or did the tiger version predate the racist version?

It's definitely the first thing and could be the second thing as well. Okay. And there's no like wonderful person that we can credit with coining the tiger version that replaced it. Basically, what happened is people in the U.S. took a just as a group seem to have agreed that we'll talk about tigers instead in a way that feels like nonsense again. Yeah. I mean, it's not just the epithet that, I mean, that's enough, right, to make it awful. But the topic of it is so disgusting because it's, you know, people fleeing one of the most horrendous institutions in history, chattel slavery, and gruesomely cruel things like sending dogs after them, you know, and then put it in like a cutesy little rhyme

is really sickening. Yeah, and unfortunately it was popular, especially in the late 1800s. One of the only other scholars on this is an American chemist named Henry Carrington Bolton who like moonlighted as a folklorist. And in a survey of school kids he did in 1888, he found that the N-word version was far and away the main U.S. one. And that's a couple decades after slavery was abolished.

The good news is I, as a kid, had never heard that version. And I think a lot of people have not heard that version. We've really moved past it in many ways. But if you ever run across someone on the Internet saying, like, please don't do eeny, meeny, miny, moe, this will probably be why. Yeah. I mean, cause it wasn't that long ago and like, uh, either, uh, Ella or Caroline said that some people still say it. So it's, uh, you know, it's it's still, it hasn't, while we've certainly improved in terms of not using the racist version of the rhyme, it's like, it's kind of shocking how close in history these things are. The one way it got exported out of the U.S. besides Americans

spreading it is that in 1935, British author Rudyard Kipling published a collection called Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides. And this was pretty much just Kipling writing down what kids were saying at the time in the 1930s. But he recorded this version along with others. And he was a huge hit author, so so his book sold and that's part of how it got out there i think that's why it's such a holdout like why caroline not caroline and i would have heard yeah yeah it is because kipling is pretty pretty famous here obviously um yeah so it would make sense that especially the older generation would have heard that would still have yeah yeah i feel like it's so silly though because it's such a

when there's such prevalent versions that don't include that in it circulating now yeah it's so absurd to me that there is still that version that comes out of people first oh no yeah but they do it on purpose they do it because they feel like because they're like you can't stop me from saying things sorry i, I'm just, I get so annoyed having these conversations with older people. I have a person in my life who uses that version,

who we call out for it every single time. It's so frustrating now. Yeah. And like, every time it happens, they do say like, oh, I just forgot about it. And like, I feel like there's like sure there's just like it's not even that they're i mean no they are clearly racist for saying that

stuff it's awful but no actually no i'm gonna leave that sentence there they are racist for saying that sort of stuff there is also this thing of like not putting in any effort to not do it, which is just as bad, you know, like not necessarily always being actively racist, but then not putting that effort in to not be racist on top of that, which is incredibly frustrating being around this person. That's all dead on because we really are pretty past it it was pretty hard to find modern examples of people doing it the one celebrity example of this really bad version is it was 2014 oh come on and unfortunately there is was a british television show where car weirdo jeremy cl. Oh, that guy. Where Jeremy Clarkson is a massive racist. So and just like a generally hated public figure in the UK now.

Didn't he like literally assault someone on set or something? Yeah, he punched one of the producers in the face for not giving him the right food or something. Yeah, apparently the BBC told him they would fire him if he did one more racist thing. And then before that could happen, he assaulted this producer and they fired him for that. So, it's that kind of guy. So you get like one free racism pass?

And he complained about it too. He said that even the angel Gabriel would have a hard time with the pressure of not saying another racist thing. Shut up. Are you kidding me? I'm not paraphrasing. I didn't know you said that.

Yeah. So it's tough. But it's fine because he was kicked off the BBC and is now with Amazon Prime. Perfect. Yeah. So canceled. He got so canceled that now he has an entirely new platform. He really felt the repercussions of his behavior there, didn't he?

Yeah. Yeah, that's right. He only still drives cars with his friends. Yeah. Yeah. And then on top of this, some folks are asking that Eenie Meenie Miney Moe not be said in general. Some folks are asking that Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Moe not be said in general. And maybe the most complex case of it was in 2017, the UK retailer Primark removed a Walking Dead T-shirt from their inventory.

Because the TV show Walking Dead had like a big cliffhanger where a villain character used Eenie, Meenie, miny, moe before choosing someone to execute. And so they made a T-shirt of just his picture and the words eeny, meeny, miny, moe. And it's not this N-word version, but either for that history or for the general grossness of a super violent villain shirt, people asked that it be taken off shelves and the actor complained about it on Twitter. And so this can get very complicated and multi-layered about what is otherwise a children's rhyme about tigers i feel like part of that might be just to do with like feelings of like potential violent if it's for kids that that shirt potential violence in like schools that that can incite um exactly i imagine if you'd sold that in like the states for example that would have had pretty bad implications along with it um in terms of school violence so i could see why that would

be taken away yeah it's gruesome it's also just really tropey to me the like here's a here's a children's rhyme or here's like chill, like like nursery music combined with something horrific. Like, can we just be done with that trope? Right. Yeah. If you direct a children's choir, stop doing spooky covers of songs. I don't like it. It makes trailers scary.

I'm just trying to see the movie after the trailer. Stop it. I'm just trying to see the movie after the trailer. Stop it. Off of all that past and present cultural meaning with it, we have a last takeaway that's much more scientific. Going to get into child development, which is fun. But here we go into takeaway number three. Eenie, meenie, minie, moe is one sign that babies and young children might understand counting before they understand numbers. It's sort of hard to separate those two processes.

It's not in a way because we've been talking about it. Like the idea if you're crocheting and you're doing eeny, meeny, miny, moe, that's counting without numbers, right? So, yeah, that makes so much sense it's yeah it's like babies um can understand like language without speech because babies um will learn sign language quicker than they will learn to speak yeah yeah it turns out they learn the cadence of speech and the general they actually can kind of learn not exactly grammatical structure but the cadence of grammatical structure before they actually learn it like babbling is a very important stage of child development because it's showing that they're it's not just like nonsense stuff

it's them actually learning the cadence of words and of grammar like there's this adorable video it's one of my favorite videos next to the baby quails in space it's these two uh i think they're like they look like they're about one maybe almost toddlers i know this video immediately you know what i'm talking about it's so good they're twins and they're babbling to each other nonsense words. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's not real language, but they have the cadence of a conversation down perfectly. So it's just, it's nonsense words. There's no real words, nothing. But they have the, they are imitating perfectly the cadence of a conversation.

And it really seems like it's a rugrat situation where they have some secret baby language that they're talking to each other and understanding. It's amazing. I think if I remember correctly from that video, especially they have like the question cadence where, you know, you go up at the end. Yes. Like a call and response. And that is so indicative of their ability to like understand those things. And hand gestures, too.

Like the ba-ba-ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-da. Ba-ba-da-ba-da, ba-ba-da-ba-da-ba-da. It's amazing. Wow. It's like the computer game The Sims. I love it. It really is. Yeah, this study here, it's basically one study and then follow-up work on it by colleagues at Johns Hopkins University and at Rutgers University, based on the idea that most kids start understanding number words around age three or four in a concrete way.

Dr. Jinjin Jenny Wang ran an experiment in 2019 with kids as old as 20 months or even as young as 14 months. And they would pull toys out of boxes in front of the kids, and they would either count the toys with numbers, like 1, 2, 3, 4, or they would just say the same generic word, such as this, this, this, and this. And interestingly, the kids had an easier time tracking the amounts of toys if the researchers used number words. Like the kids do not understand the numbers yet. Just the action of the counting increases their understanding of the amounts.

Okay. Oh, wow. Which is really cool. Wow, that's so young as well. Like I would never, from three years to like, what was it? Like down to 14 months. So a year and two months. Wow. That's so, that's crazy. And they're doing follow up work. They're trying to figure out, maybe it's because of the stable order of numerical counting words. Like you're kind

of picking them up from people who speak your language. It could be the one-to-one relationship between items and the numbers. But this whole study and possible phenomenon, it helps explain the popularity of stuff like eeny, meeny, miny, moe. If kids can count before they can totally do numbers, there's this zone in your life where eeny meeny miny moe is like perfect that's that's the exact thing you want to do it fills that gap doesn't it yeah yeah totally yeah so i don't know i find that cool that anybody's finding that out too like also finally more research into how kids work great like let's think about it yeah i mean i mean it's so interesting because children are i I mean, this has been, it was quite a huge debate for a long time in linguistics, but there's a general idea that children are born with certain structures, sort of like pre you're born with certain, an innate ability to

pick up on language really quickly in a similar way that birds are born with the innate ability to pick up on bird song. And there's this crystallization period. It's why when I talk about like birds and people kind of, it's not just that like parrots can mimic human language. It's that birds and human beings both have similar language learning patterns as babies. And like if you teach children to be bilingual, they can pick up languages just incredibly quickly. I'm trying to learn Italian. I'm so jealous of babies. Babies are so much smarter than me when it comes to learning a language. It's it's like it's I feel so defeated sometimes because I talked to a friend

who has a young child and they were like, oh yeah, they picked up, uh, they picked up this new language in like six months. I'm like, I've been trying to learn this for two years. And it's so hard because you've, your brain has kind of passed this crystallization period. It doesn't mean you can't learn a new language at any age it just means it's harder and so it's really yeah it's really interesting because it sounds like from these studies it's like children have this like they're they're born with and then quickly absorb these kind of rhythmic numerical structures yeah and caroline hinted to this before as well but that's especially um important for making new sounds and languages like like with corsa that and and welsh there's a letter a double l which is i don't know yeah i don't even do it properly but there you go but children can just like their

mouths i don't know the ability to like shape do the things that we can't figure yeah even like rolling r's in like spanish or something or in welsh as well like children pick that stuff up so quickly the ability to do that which i'm so it's just so impressive you're so moldable yeah so this this is coming from somebody who is learning to speak Welsh at the moment. And that sounds about right, to be honest. It's so hard. I really feel you, Katie. We saw your book earlier of teach your cat Welsh.

Now I'm imagining also like teach your foolish adult a language. And the adult's face is like, ah! My cats know better welsh than i do so hey folks that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro, with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Mega takeaway number one, Eenie Meenie Miney Moe has unclear origins, probably rooted in the centuries-old tradition of counting out rhymes. Two caveats with that, this is just one theory, and the internet is often wrong and over-claiming about children's rhymes,

such as Ring Around the Rosie. Takeaway number two, the main version of Eenie Meenie Miney Moe was super racist for many decades due to United States culture and also due to Rudyard Kipling. due to United States culture and also due to Rudyard Kipling. And takeaway number three, eeny, meeny, miny, moe, is one sign that babies might understand counting before they understand numbers. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly, incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this

show or support Let's Learn Everything or support any of our buddies at MaximumFun.org. Members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the Ithaca Kitty, another extremely strange children's fad based on a stripy cat. Visit sifpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than 13 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of MaxFun bonus shows, like special Let's Learn Everything audio. It's special. It's just for members. Thank you for being somebody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things.

Check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include a piece for the Paris Review by poet and researcher Adrian Raphael and further digital resources from the Smithsonian, Vox.com, The Guardian, and more. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people, also the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skadigok people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in Italy. Ella and Caroline each taped this in the UK. I want to acknowledge

that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join that Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord. And hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator.

This week's pick is episode 103. That's about the topic of the color green. And that is one of six SIF episodes about colors. We have entire podcasts about green, gray, blue, orange, magenta, and maybe my favorite from a premise perspective, beige. So I recommend those episodes. I also recommend the podcast Let's Learn Everything, hosted by our friends Ella Hubber and Caroline Roper and our friend Tom Lum.

It's right here on Maximum Fun. And then their website is letslearneverything.com. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks also to the Beacon AV Lab for taping support and more. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members and thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week

with more secretly incredibly fascinating So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.