Eenie Meenie Miney Mo
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: You're playing a game, and it's time to figure out who goes first. You could rock, paper, scissors for it, or you could do the following. CECILIA CLEMENS: Eeny meeny miny mo. ANNA KULBASHNY.Catch a tiger by the toe.
EMILE BEAUBIEN.If it hollers, let him go. SARAYU MUDIYA.Eeny meeny miny mo.
Eenie Meenie Miney Moe (2013) cast and crew credits, including actors, actresses, directors, writers and more. Eeny, meeny, miny, mo is the first line of a counting rhyme, used by children to decide who goes first in a game or who is the team captain or who is “it” in a game. “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe” also known as “Eena, meena, mina, mo” is a popular counting rhyme and singing game. It is very hard to establish the exact origin of the song as it has so many accepted forms, in different languages and countries. Eeny Meeny Miny Mo, A Chant That Spans The Globe Every kid seems to know a version of Eeny Meeny Miny Mo. Harvard PhD student Adrienne Raphel looked into its origins, and tells NPR's Rachel Martin.
MARTIN: Every kid seems to know this rhyme, or at least a variation of it, including the kids you just heard - 11-year-old Cecilia Clemens and Anna Kulbashny, 10-year-old Emile Beaubien and Sarayu Mudiya, age 6. But where does it come from?
Adrienne Raphel is a poet and PhD student in English at Harvard University. Raphel wrote about eeny meeny miny mo for The Paris Review. And she says you can trace the rhyme's origin way back to when shepherds used it to count hundreds of years ago. And it sounded a little like this. ADRIENNE RAPHEL: Yan, tan, tehtera, methera, pimp, sethera, lethera, hovera, dovera - so you can kind of hear the eeny meeny miny mo in it, right? MARTIN: Kind of. RAPHEL: Kind of.
Eenie Meenie Miny Moe
MARTIN: So how did it morph? I mean, there've been several iterations of this since, over these many, many hundreds of years. I understand that one of the earlier versions of the rhyme included a racial slur. Walk us through the journey of this rhyme.
RAPHEL: An earlier version of the rhyme that children recited on playgrounds did include a racial slur sometimes. And that then caused a lot of entomologists to do kind of back formations, and say, well, because it had this racial slur, we think it may have had all of these other, you know, African American origins and all of this stuff with it. But it's really hard to - and the history of it is much more complicated than that because the sounds in this rhyme are really sticky. You know, they're like these nonsense syllables that then sound like words that you recognize. So then you stick words that you recognize into the nonsense syllables. And then the words that recognized take on a life of their own.