On The Evolution of the Words "Pee" and "Poop."

(here's a cross-post from Playground Jungle)

Folklorists generally ignored fart rhymes and other "naughty" ones up until about the 1970s. Even Iona Opie, a nursery rhyme expert who was no prude, was referring to "unprintable rhymes" in the 1950s. But it can generally be assumed that any time you find a counting-out rhyme about a stink, that rhyme was also used when someone farted.

Here's one from The Counting Out Rhymes of Children, an 1888 tome by a guy named Henry Carrington Bolton (with a name like that, he just about HAD to be a 19th century scholar):

Ink, pink, a penny a wink
Oh, how do you stink!
-- (Ontario, Canada)

Another one goes back even further - Mary Cooper recorded it in Tom Thumb's Pretty Song Book, the very oldest surviving collection of nursery rhymes, which she published in 1744

Little robin redbreast sat on a pole
niddle noddle went his head, poop went his hole

Eventually people cleaned up the last line - it was later published as "wiggle waggle went his tail," which, of course, doesn't even rhyme. Lame. Incidentally, the "poop" here means "fart." When the word "poop" first appeared in America, it meant "butt." In 1640, a guy named Ned Ward wrote a sentence that went "while he manages his whiffle staff with one hand, he scratches his poop with the other." But a 1714 dictionary actually defined the word "poop" as "to break wind backwards." It didn't start being used in its modern sense until around 1900 (according to the book on the left).  So, while "poop" has become a broadly accepted, even polite term for both excretion and that which one excretes, you're really showing that you're a fan of traditional values when you use a much older term, like %&%^.

Another rhyme in the same 1744 collection:

Piss a bed, piss a bed,
barley butt
your bum is so heavy
you can't get up.

This later turned up in Joyce's Ulysses.. "Piss" meant the same thing then as it does now - in fact, it's one of the older words in the English language. People starting saying the first initial, "pee" (I suppose we should spell it "p---" ) when "piss" started to be considered impolite. Even the cleaned-up versions of the rhymes are pretty well out of circulation now, as far as we can tell, but the 1700s were not a terribly prudish time.

Ask the Smart Aleck Staff: The Boston Tea Party

Here comes some reader mail from Ava, a reader in Nebraska,

In your book, you say that the Boston Tea Party was a protest against the government giving tax breaks to a business. So why do the tea party guys dress up like colonists? And why did the Boston Tea Party people dress up like Native Americans?


Great quest, Ava! First of all, here's a multiple choice question for you:

Which party is most often guilty of making wild claims about how The Founding Fathers would agree with them?
a. Democrats
b. Republicans
c. Libertarians
d. whichever party is not currently in power.

The answer is usually D (and, therefore, C - those guys are never in charge).

Both sides are making ridiculous generalizations to imply that the framers of our country all felt the same way on any given issue (especially issues relating to things they couldn't have imagined in the 18th century).

Exactly who counts as a Founding Father and who doesn't is a bit of an X factor - some count everyone who lived in the 1700s, some just count the people who fought in the wars and/or served in congress, and some just pick and choose at random. But any way you slice it, the Founding Fathers were a rather diverse bunch (for a bunch of rich white guys). They didn't agree on much back then, and they wouldn't agree on much now. When you ask what the founding fathers would think of any given issue, you really have to take it on a founding father by founding father basis.

 And even then, their individual views evolved over time - it's impossible to guess what they'd make of the situation now. Even if we dug them up (you know that we here on the Smart Aleck Staff just LOVE grave robbing) to see if they'd registered their disapproval by rolling over in their graves (as one does), it would take some hardcore forensics to figure out WHEN they'd rolled over (or how many times). Even if they were facing down, they might have rolled over at the Missouri Compromise, then again the Nebraska Kansas Act, and again during Bloody Kansas.

As for the costumes, one thing conservatives and liberals have in common is that their protest rallies tend to be taken as an invitation to put on stupid costumes, say stupid things, and act obnoxious (see also: the Smart Aleck's Guide to Making an Ass Of Yourself) (one that we're definitely qualified to write!). Protest rallies in the 1770s were probably no different.

But we digress (as we do). In the 18th century, the East India Company was  BIG business - it actually controlled parts of India for a time. In the 1770s, the British government gave them a legal monopoly on importing and exporting tea - colonists who wanted to buy tea from anyone who wasn't one of their consignees had to buy tea from smugglers. Smugglers didn't pay taxes, so they were able to keep their prices low. To help the East India Company, the government gave them MASSIVE tax breaks, allowing them to lower their prices and push competitors out of business.

But there was no spending cut attached to the tax break, so the government made up for the loss of revenue by passing The Townsend Acts, which added some taxes for colonists, including one on tea. They were not exactly crippling taxes, but the colonists were rather miffed that they had to pick up the slack to allow for a company to get a tax break.

So they organized boycotts, and started pushing locally-grown tea that didn't need to be imported (but apparently was not very good).  It worked well enough that in 1770 the government repealed most of the taxes in the Townsend Acts - except for the one on tea, which they left in place just to show that they could. For a few years, taxes on both the company and the colonies went up and down. By 1773, the East India Company was basically operating tax free, and were allowed to do their own exporting, cutting out middlemen and helping keep their prices far lower than any competitors.  Some in parliament wanted to do away with the tea tax, since it was just annoying the colonists, but they had set it up so that the revenues it brought in were what paid the wages of local officials, like judges.

With the smaller-time dealers and smugglers out of business, the East India Company now controlled the tea trade - if they didn't name your store as a consignee, you'd be going out of business.  Several people who WERE consignees resigned in protest. In 1773, seven East India Company ships were sent to the colonies, but since their consignees had resigned, six had to be sent back - all except the one bound for Boston, where the governor had talked the consignees out of resigning.

Sam Adams (brother of John) held a meeting at which people passed a resolution urging the ship to turn around and go home. 25 people guarded it against being unloaded. On the last night before the deadline by which they had to either pay the duties and unload the tea or go home, another meeting was held, attended by some 7000 people.

According to legend, when it became apparent that the governor wasn't about to let the ships go home without paying the duties on their cargo, Adams said "this meeting can do nothing further to save the country," which was the coded signal for the tea partiers to take action.  As with most of these legends, it isn't exactly right - the phrase may or may not have been a code, and Adams may have tried to STOP people from leaving because he wasn't done talking yet.

But hundreds DID leave, and one group (from 30 to 130, depending on who you ask) boarded the ship, supposedly dressed as Mohawk Indians (to conceal their identities and guard against being accused of treason, though it's hard to imagine the disguises actually fooling anyone   - we here at the Smart Aleck's Guide think there's just something about a protest that makes people want to get dressed up in pointless costumes). Once on board, they dumped the tea in the water.

What they were there for is probably a mixed bag - some might have been generally anti-tax, but it seems like the issue most were protesting was paying taxes to allow for a company's tax break. We don't know of anyone railing that parliament should have been cutting spending altogether and eliminating the need for taxes.

Others, of course, were probably just there because it sounded like a real party.

 No one at the time really seems to have thought they made much of a point, and even most of the pro-independence colonists seem to have found the whole affair sort of embarrassing - the sort of thing that made them look like they were nuts. The British responded with MORE "intolerable acts."

But the bottom line is that the party was about saying "this sucks, let's change it." This is something both parties can get behind - neither has a monopoly on the Boston Tea Party.   But it's certainly VERY difficult to imagine the modern "tea partiers" having any issue with the government making things easier on the East India Company.  In any case, the common notion that all of the "founding fathers" favored small government, low taxes, and the rest of the Libertarian Party platform goes against the basics of human nature. The "Framers" were arguing about what the part in the Constitution about promoting the general welfare meant before the ink was even dry.

Victorian "Mummy Unwrapping Parties:" Fact or Fiction?

One often comes across mention of the Victorian fad for "unwrapping parties." In those days, you could buy an actual mummy at any decent antiquities auction, and many of them were bought and publicly "unwrapped." According to the oft-repeated story, it became a huge fad among the upper class to host "unwrapping parties," where a mummy would be unrolled in one's parlor, with the trinkets found within the folds given out as gifts.

While we here at the Smart Aleck's Guide were working on our guide to grave robbing, we went looking for accounts of actual unwrapping parties. As far as we can tell, the term "unwrapping party" didn't appear in print until the very late 20th century.  We never found a single account of anyone unwrapping a mummy for the fun of it at a social function. There are no diary entries like:

Today was the big unwrapping party of Lord Autumnbottom's estate...the creature was gruesome and the smell horrid, and Henry and I were so covered with yellow dust that a man outdoors thought we were urchins and suggested that we die and decrease the surplus population. Henry says we must get a mummy of our own before Ascot, but I'm not at all sure I shouldn't rather simply play whist.

Public unwrappings DID happen. Here's the "party" invitation that probably sparked the urban legend - it's advertised a gathering at Lord Londesborough's home with "a mummy from Thebes to be unrolled at half-past two:"

But while this sure looks like a party invite, it wasn't a social gathering. Surviving accounts of what went on that 10th day of June, 1850, make it sound less like a party than an academic lecture.  Most attendees were members of the Society of Antiquaries.  

There were many other notable unwrapping (including a highly-publicized one in Boston at which a man unwrapped a "princess" who turned out to have a wiener), but most of them were held in lecture halls and universities, not at private homes. Many accounts indicate that having one at a party would have stunk up the house (even by Victorian standards), and that the dust and dried bitumen would have gotten all over everything. Unwrappings were not something to attend in party clothes!

Full details of what we "uncovered*" are in our new book, The Smart Aleck's Guide to Grave Robbing!

* - Yeah, when you talk about researching grave robbing, making puns about stories you "dug up" just comes with the territory.

Are there dark origins behind "Step On A Crack and Break Your Mother's Back?"

(the following is a cross-post from one of our blogs, Playground Jungle):

Here’s one that everyone knew to chant while walking down the sidewalk:

Step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back.

This has been recorded in print since at least the late 19th century, often with a few additions:

Step on a line, break your mother’s spine

Step on a hole, break your mother’s sugar bowl

Step on a nail, you’ll put your dad in jail

So the thing to step on here is probably a bowl. Everything else will kill people or, at least, uproot your life considerably. One can survive the loss of a sugar bowl. Health nuts will even say that you’ll benefit from it.

One person I knew added another:

Giggle while you pee, you’ll turn into an old dead tree.

Stepping on cracks has long been subject to superstition. In addition to the danger of breaking your mother’s back, a 1905 book, Superstition and Education, lists several other grim superstitions: that if you step on a crack, you will have bad luck, or that you will not get a surprise at home that you otherwise would have.

Many claim that the original rhyme was “step on a crack and your mother will turn black,” and that the superstition went that stepping on a crack meant that you’d have a black baby. Indeed, Iona Opie noted that that one was fairly common in parts of the UK in the 1950s, but there’s no real reason to think it’s the original, not just another variation that came and went - the idea that it was the original probably comes from people who pick that one line out of Opie's long entry on the subject. 
At the same time, kids were saying that if you stepped on a crack, you’d be chased by bears. This idea was invented by A.A. Milne in his poem “Lines and Squares,” but, from Opie’s description, was a more widespread superstition than the racial one.  You have to watch out when people tell you the "original meanings" of things -  like the supposed "secret origins" or nursery rhymes that go around, they're seldom true. And this is coming from the blog that connects songs about pooping in your overalls back to ancient ballads about making violins out of dead bodies.

These are all, in any case, some of those superstitions that no one really believes. While the good luck brought from a penny can be debatable, most kids figure out right away that people who step on cracks in the sidewalk don’t come home to dead mothers and don’t get chased by bears (at least not very often).

The Smart Aleck's Guide to Naughty Playground Rhymes and Children's Folklore ebook will be out next week!