You’re daft, you’re potty, you’re barmy.Someone thought to be staring too hard (an intrusion on privacy which is universally
resented) is warned, Stare, stare, like a bear,/Then you’ll know me anywhere; and the
accused one may reply, I’m looking at you with your face so blue/ And your nose turned
up like a kangaroo. Liars, especially, are vilified (Liar, liar, your pants are on fire), and
can only defend themselves with solemn oaths (Wet my finger, wipe it dry, Cut my
throat if I tell a lie). Cowards, cry-babies and sneaks have been ritually taunted with
their failings for a hundred years and more: Cowardy, cowardy, custard is part of the
title of a pantomime of 1836; Cry, baby, cry is quoted in an essay by Charles Lamb in
The London Magazine, April 1821; and ‘Tell tale tit’ appeared in Tommy Thumb’s Pretty
Song Book, vol. 2, 1744 (Spit Cat, Spit, Your tongue shall be slit, And all the Dogs in our
Town Shall have a bit.)
If, in the past, more notice had been taken of the minor delights of childhood, the
same sort of antiquity could probably be claimed for many of the catches with which
schoolchildren amuse and tease each other. A correspondent to Notes and Queries,
1905, showed that the lines Adam and Eve and Pinch-me/Went down to the river to
bathe;/Adam and Eve were drowned,/Who do you think was saved? were already ‘a
schoolboy’s catch for the innocent new boy’ in 1855. The trick dialogue beginning ‘I went
up one pair of stairs’ and ending ‘I saw a monkey’, with the dupe having to answer ‘Just
like me’ after each statement, was recorded by J.O. Halliwell in The Nursery Rhymes of
England, 1844.
Rhyme and assonance give an almost spell-like authority, and this is exploited in the
solemn oaths and imprecations children use to regulate their social life. When swearing
to the truth they will chant, with hands crossed over heart, Cross my heart and hope to
die,/Drop down dead if I tell a lie. They will confirm a bargain by linking little fingers
and reciting, Touch teeth, touch leather,/Can’t have back for ever and ever. As with
swopping, so with giving. Something given must not be asked for again, and the answer
to one who does so is the centuries old formula (which once more directly consigned the
asker to the Devil), Give a thing, take a thing,/Dirty man’s plaything. The ability to keep
a secret is tested with a rhymed ritual:
Can you keep a secret?
I don’t suppose you can.
You mustn’t laugh or giggle
While I tickle your hand.And even the quick-fire exclamations needed for claiming something found are often
thought to need the reinforcement of rhyme: Finders keepers,/Losers weepers!
Regulatory rhymes are also needed to organise the playing of games. At the outset of a
game of He (or Tig, Tag or Touch, according to locality) the players must form up in a
line or circle and the ‘boss’ of the game counts along the line the number of counts
prescribed by the stressed syllables of some little rhyme such as
180 TYPES AND GENRES