dot-com wanes; eny, meny, miny, mo

[Laurence Horn]

At 3:26 PM -0400 7/6/00, Steve K. wrote:
>
>For all of the racist collocations I was exposed to growing up,
>interstingly I only know this as
>
>"catch a teeny by his toe" (rhymes with eeny; nonsense word)
>"catch a Tigger by his toe" (as in the Winnie the Pooh character).
>
>I heard both growing up, and until now, never realized I was hearing an
>altered version.
>
If our version had been "catch a tigger by his toe", I would have
definitely wondered (especially being on intimate terms with the Pooh
books, since after all Tigger is a proper name and besides he was too nice
to want to make holler).  But ours was definitely "tiger".  Then there are
the variant versions of the coda--"My mother told me to pick this one--Y O
U spells 'you'/O U T spells 'out'".  As i recall, there were other variants
one could sneakily invoke to get your finger to point to whomever you
REALLY wanted it to point to.  ("...to pick this very one...?")

larry