Nigger - I am 35 and I spent the years you would use that rhyme in the North West of England.
Like other people who grew up in an entirely white place, I never knew what the word meant.
When I was a kid, the racist term for black people was nig-nog, and I only knew that from the telly.
By the time I moved to Ireland I was past the age when you played tig, or whatever you need the rhyme for, but I heard my younger brother and his Irish kiddiwink playmates using the word tinker instead, as you say Iteki.
Now as I think about it, that was far more racist to us, because we all *knew * what a tinker was in rural Ireland, twenty odd years ago, and they were despised, by and large, completely and utterly based on a negative racist stereotype.
But a nigger? No concept of what one might be, so the word had no resonance.
“Nigger”. Age 43 raised in West Bend, Wisconsin. Nobody ever corrected us either. I expicitly remember saying it in front of teachers in grade school. Until in 3rd grade the teacher rounded us all up an announced that the principal didn’t want anyone using that word any more. We didn’t even know it was a bad word, to tell you the truth. Nobody ever told us.
There weren’t any black kids in school. In fact, I don’t believe there were any blacks living in the entire town. The first time I saw a black person in the flesh I was in 6th grade and at summer camp.
My childhood there was much like growing up on “Leave it to Beaver”, so that should explain a lot. Very white, middle class, conservative town.
Heard both the racial slur and “lion” (maybe my memory is tainted since everyone else remembers “tiger”).
I’m 40 and grew up in a Detroit suburb.
We also added, “and my mother told me to choose this very best one” to the end.
My kids:
‘Catch a fish upon his toe’ (which I realise doesn’t make perfect sense, but it’s what they happened to pick up at school)
aged 5 and 7 (England)
North and east of Parkchester, up to Throgs Neck and Pelham Bay Park, anytime before about 1970. It was a pretty tribal area, then, and a no-go zone for blacks, enforced by teen gangs and to some extent the Mafia. My own neighborhood is completely mixed, now.
Of course, my Irish-American grandmother wasn’t entirely convinced that Italians were really white people up until the day she died.
I always heard it as “tiger”. I see the other person from Northen Ireland used the word “nigger” which seems bizarre. I’m 25 btw.
As for the “entirely white” neighbourhood, of my local area of roughly several thousand people there was a grand total of two chinese families and one Arab. No black people at all. Also 99.99% religiously homogenous as well.
which is why we would draw “eenie-meenie” out with “my mother said to pick the very best one and you are it so i pick you and everyone else is not picked at all . . .” ad nauseum until you calculate finally landing on the person you want picked/excluded.
Always used Tiger. Never knew there was any other word to use till I saw Pukp Fiction and he used nigger. And after I saw that, I assumed that it had to be one of the two, monkey and rabbit? That’s just plain silly!
Of course, we usually used “one potato, two potato”, or “bubble-gum bubble-gum in a dish”
