Underground Rhymes

Adventures

During the last year or so, I have noticed that with increasing frequency, G and B have been coming home with these underground rhymes that I learned when I was in grade school. I think it was probably natural for me to assume as a child that these were just going around during my few years in grade school and we had discovered something new and it would peter out.  Yet these boys are coming home and repeating these rhymes (mostly verbatim) as I learned them and I know they didn’t learn them from us and assume the other boys didn’t learn them from their parents.  So they are passed from child to child through the generations.  Well, now I wonder whether my mom and dad ever noticed this phenomenon and whether my dad learned the same rhymes in grade school.  I shall be sure to ask, but I shall also list a few here because I believe the chances are that you learned these in grade school also:

  1. “[So-and-so] and [so-and-so] sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.”  (Yes, everyone knows that one.)
  2. “Here comes the bride, big fat and wide.  Where is the groom?  He’s in the bathroom.”  (G and B did not know the next two lines, so I had to teach them.  “Why is he there?  He lost his underwear.  Where did it go?  He flushed it down the hole.”)
  3. “Made ya’ look, made ya’ look, now you’re in my baby book.” (I learned it as, “made ya’ read a story book.”)
  4. “Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg, Batmobile lost a wheel and Joker got away.” (This one even made it into Batman the Animated Series and The Simpsons).
  5. See if you can finish this one: “Deck the halls with gasoline, fa la la la la la la la la…”
  6. What underground rhymes can you remember from the grade school playground?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *