Lore and Language of School Children
#Linguistics #child-originated culture #skip rope songs, #counting out rhymes, #parodies, #singing verses, #superstitions, #420
Linguistics child-originated culture, skip rope songs, counting out
rhymes, parodies, singing verses, superstitions, of children
themselves.
One by one, all the books I wish I had time to write get written.
Sometimes, after they come out, I still wish I'd done them myself,
but not this one. It is a model of folklore collecting and like so
much of the best folklorism in all countries, it seems to have been
done by a couple with no great scholarly standing at least
previously and with no Scholarships, Fellowships, Funds or Bourses.
If the Fords or the Rockefellers or the Bollingens or the
Guggenheims had financed this they'd be passing it around the office
right now and they'd all be as proud and happy as mud larks.
This is not a collection of material of the Mother Goose type folk
poetry which adults teach children
.
It is all child-originated culture the skip rope songs, counting
out rhymes, parodies, singing verses, superstitions, of children
themselves.
There is nothing like it in English that comes close to being as
extensive. The work of Dorothy [
name illegible
] and Patricia Evans in America is more intensive, but so far they
have not equaled the Opies in bulk, or in geographic range.
Sixty-three elementary schools, scattered evenly across the British
Isles from northern Scotland to Land's End, contributed material [
illegible word
] for several years. The Opies corresponded extensively with both
students and teachers and visited a large number of the schools.
Besides this, their acknowledgment pages list hundreds of individual
informants and secondary sources.
It might be thought that most of these jingles and jokes and customs
would be specially and peculiarly British. Indeed they are not.
The hidden civilization of childhood is close to being at least
Pan-European. The specific customs and poems are spread throughout
the English-speaking world. Not only are they spread, they do
spread right now.
Parodies of the Davy Crockett song not only jump the Atlantic from
Maryland to Shropshire, they leap the Pacific and appear in
Australia within a couple months.
The child world is a coherent primitive culture lying right at our door. I do not accept the Lévy-Bruhl hypothesis. I know primitive people are not childlike but children are cultural primmitives . Some aspects of their ways find parallel in barbaric cultures, some in hunting and gathering cultures, others appear as traces in our own Neolithic. Irrespective of their values for culture history, they have a far greater value for us as being the immediate roots of contemporary culture. Moreover, since the activities of children are confined for the most part to very small ranges of age - sixth graders despise the games and jingles of fourth graders - many culture processes are greatly accelerated, and can be studied as we study heredity with fruit flies. On the other hand, children seem extraordinarily conservative: stale jokes, trick conundrums, bits of doggerel, can be traced back with little change to Elizabethan times. Also, childhood holiday activities preserve some of the most ancient rites and customs of the European peoples.
A discussion of the poetic virtues of these jingles would have to be
complex and subtle; it would run to many pages. Sufficient to say
that
they embody not only psychological and historical sources of
poetry, but in many instances exhibit the fundamentals of poetic
stimulus and response.
One of the best collections of this type is
Claude Roy,
Trésor de la Poésie Populaire
,
(Treasury of French popular poetry) published by Seghers, which also
includes the bulk of French Mother Goose poetry. Roy himself has
been greatly influenced by such poetry, but so has almost every
other French poet of importance from Supervielle to Yves Bonnefoy.
We know the great prevalence of such influences in German
literature, beginning of course with Goethe.
Faust itself, shall we say, is one enormous skip rope and counting
out rhyme?
W.H. Auden introduced the mode into contemporary English poetry, but
it never seems to have properly caught on. Possibly American poets
do not care to use this material, but even so they should know it
thoroughly. And so should children. There are a couple of scandalous
chapters on pranks and jokes which my two little girls devoured with
glee.
As a concluding note, I should mention that the Opies are also the
authors of
The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes
and
The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book
.
I would say that these three books are an essential part of the
library for every student of culture, anthropologist or other, and
for every serious student or practitioner of the art of letters.
KENNETH REXROTH
April 1960
This review of Iona and Peter Opie's
The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren
(Oxford University Press, 1959) originally appeared in
The Nation
(9 April 1960). Copyright 1960. Reprinted here by permission of the
Kenneth Rexroth Trust.
First published in 1959, Iona and Peter Opie's The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren is a path breaking work of scholarship that is also a splendid and enduring work of literature. Going outside the nursery, with its assortment of parent-approved entertainments, to observe and investigate the day-to-day creative intelligence and activities of children, the Opies bring to life the rites and rhymes, jokes and jeers, laws, games, and secret spells of what has been called "the greatest of savage tribes, and the only one which shows no signs of dying out."
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Oxford English Dictionary Makes New Words Legit, Because YOLO
“YOLO,” the acronym for “you only live once,” which the OED defines
as “used to express the view that one should make the most of the
present moment without worrying about the future (often as a
rationale for impulsive or reckless behaviour).”
Several times each year, the editors of the Oxford English
Dictionary add new words they deem worthy of inclusion based on both
FOMO and how they see the English language evolving. Some of the new
entries are a bit more salacious than others. Indeed, we are too
prudish to publish some of them, but many of the newcomers are
important to travelers. Others are connected to Roald Dahl and his
writings, including frightsome, scrummy, scrumptious, splendiferous,
and human bean.
Among the more provocative words you can now feel free to use is
“biatch,” along with its variants beeotch, beoch, beotch, beyotch,
biotch, biyotch, and beech. Still thinking “fuhgeddaboudit”? Feel
free to use that word going forward as the interjection, which comes
from “forget about it!”, has gained legitimacy as well.
The latest derp heard on the street is that, for many of the geek
chic, digital detoxing is causing FOMO and emoji withdrawal. Srsly.
I wasn't surprised by any of this, however, given that my party
turned into an omnishambles due to a lack of guac although a lot of
people wearing jorts and sporting fauxhawks were twerking to the
music. If you had trouble understanding part or all of the above,
please take note that the 11 words or phrases that might have given
you pause are just some of the latest entrants to the Oxford English
Dictionary. Squee!
4/20: The True Story About How Today Became Weed Day
The origin of the term 420, celebrated around the world by pot
smokers every April 20th, has long been obscured by the clouded
memories of the folks who made it a phenomenon. A 420 back story:
“420 started somewhere in San Rafael, California in the late '70s.
The term has its roots in a lost patch of cannabis in a Point Reyes,
California forest. Just as interesting as its origin, it turns out,
is how it spread. A group of five San Rafael High School friends
known as the Waldos - by virtue of their chosen hang-out spot, a
wall outside the school - coined the term in 1971. Waldo Steve,
Waldo Dave and Dave's older brother, Patrick, and confirmed their
full names and identities, which they asked to keep secret for
professional reasons. (Pot is still, after all, illegal.) One day in
the Fall of 1971 - harvest time - the Waldos got word of a Coast
Guard service member who could no longer tend his plot of marijuana
plants near the Point Reyes Peninsula Coast Guard station. A
treasure map in hand, the Waldos decided to pluck some of this free
bud. The Waldos were all athletes and agreed to meet at the statue
of Loius Pasteur outside the school at 4:20, after practice, to
begin the hunt. "We would remind each other in the hallways we were
supposed to meet up at 4:20. It originally started out 4:20-Louis
and we eventually dropped the Louis," Waldo Steve tells the
Huffington Post. The Grateful Dead picked up and moved to the Marin
County hills - just blocks from San Rafael High School. "Marin
Country was kind of ground zero for the counter culture," says
Steve. The Waldos had more than just a geographic connection to the
Dead. Mark Waldo's father took care of real estate for the Dead. And
Waldo Dave's older brother, Patrick, managed a Dead sideband and was
good friends with bassist Phil Lesh. Patrick tells the Huffington
Post that he smoked with Lesh on numerous occasions. He couldn't
recall if he used the term 420 around him, but guessed that he must
have. <snip>