Tag Archives: children’s folklore

Miss Mary Mack (“bad version”)

Text:

Performed with handclapping: 

“Miss Mary Mack Mack Mack 

All dressed in black black black 

With the silver buttons buttons buttons 

All down her back back back 

She couldn’t read read read 

She couldn’t write write write 

But she could smoke smoke smoke 

Her father’s pipe pipe pipe.”

Context:

KY is an 18-year-old American Student at USC. She grew up in North Carolina. I asked her if she knew any proverbs or commonly said phrases and she told me this one. She told me this song/rhyme that was played with handclapping when I asked her about any childhood games she remembers, but she told me she could only remember the “bad version,” which she thinks was “bad” because of the discussion of smoking/pipes.

Interpretation:

Miss Mary Mack is rather widespread, and while I’ve heard the beginning before, it wasn’t common where I grew up, so I didn’t know the whole thing. I would be considered a passive bearer of this tradition, whereas my informant would be an active bearer. It’s common that children’s songs like this will have the “good [original] version” and the “bad version” derived from the original with a few things changed to make it naughty. The naughty oikotype might be specific to the area my informant grew up in, and there may be different oikotypes in other places that are similar but have slight variations. And since this can be played as a game with handclapping, it is a way for kids to entertain themselves without a need for toys or things of that sort and it is easy to learn with a simple melody and repeating words. 

Puerto Rican Fish Pun

GM is a college student studying communications. She is Puerto Rican and grew up in Miami. Both of her parents lived in Puerto Rico before moving to the United States and passed on Puerto Rican culture to her and her siblings.

Context: This joke was told over the dining room table while eating lunch. GM said when she was younger her grandmother told her this joke.

Transcript:

GM: This is one my family tells also:

Fish 1: ¿Qué hace tu papá para el trabajo?

Fish 2: Nada

GM: So “nada” in Spanish means nothing but it also means swim. I’m not sure if other Islands or Latin countries use “nada” for swim because it depends, but in Puerto Rico you can honestly just tell by the context of the sentence or conversation. That’s what makes it so funny; The second fish’s answer could go either way.

Thoughts/Analysis: This pun uses double meaning in words and is largely a children’s joke. Different Latin cultures use different words for things, and seeing as jokes are a significant part of cultural life and this is one example of its significance in Puerto Rican life. It is similar to English/American puns, in which homonyms are used.

Bloody Mary

Context: The popular legend was spun off into an outdoors urban legend and corresponding children’s game in New York.

A.F.: For us, it [Bloody Mary] was like a, we had two ways. It was a sleepover game. We had a flashlight at someone’s house, but the main way that we would do it, so I went to elementary school in a relatively, even though it’s suburban, it’s still an isolated area, so there were like paths, that went to like houses or roads. So there was this path that led from like our, because we had like a vaguely biggish field, that went from the path to a house on my road. Which again, we thought it was like the Bloody Mary path, and if you wandered too far then Bloody Mary would come and get you.
P.Z. : Okay, so it was outdoors?
A.F.: Um, yeah, ours was actually outdoors. Yes.

Thoughts: This was a much different version than the one I am familiar with. I’m not sure if this was primarily an East-Coast variation or specific to the respondent’s school. But usually, there were not these specific, wooded, secluded paths that made this version possible.

Cheese Touch

Context: The Cheese Touch game was popularized shortly after the publishing of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series and corresponding movies. The Bone Touch was one group’s variation of this popular game, instead altered to fit a rural ranch setting, replacing the forbidden cheese with a cow hide being displayed as decor.

A.F. : Okay. The Cheese Touch is, so, um, typically if someone touched cheese in elementary school they would have the Cheese Touch and the only way to get rid of it is to pass it on to someone else.
P.Z. : Yeah, I know that we played that at my elementary school, but we had also, because we were in rural San Diego, we went to a ranch and there was a cow hide, and it still had a bone attached to it, so that started the Bone Touch, but yeah, the Cheese Touch.
A.F. : Yeah
P.Z. : That was really popular, what, late two-thousands? Early two-thousands?
A.F. : Late two-thousands, early twenty-tens.

Thoughts: I had read the books that this game was based on, so the game made perfect sense to me when it began gaining popularity. This seemed to be extremely popular for a number of years, and seemed just a variation on the ‘cooties’ game that children often also play.

The “S”

Background: My informant is a 20 year old boy who grew up in California.

G: So the concept is to just draw a cool s with the six lines and the connectors so it kind of looks 3D. This one is pretty common, we all learned it in school from our friends at some point. I think I learned it when I was 8. You can just put it anywhere, it’s funny if you put it on a homework assignment or something to kind of mess with a teacher. You see it in graffiti a lot too.

My Thoughts: I learned this when I was about the same age and going to school in Colorado. I’m not sure how long its been around, but I think it’s something that every kid learns how to do and then doodles it all over their school notes. I think I learned it from older kids, so it felt almost like an initiation.