I learned it as the N word (and at the time, had no real concept of it being wrong, or even thinking about it having a meaning). The change to ‘tiger’ here in the UK must have happened after I left primary school.
Obviously, in retrospect, It’s hard to imagine why it could ever have been acceptable, but it really was the norm at the time, and we didn’t know any better.
AFAIK the use of the word “tiger” in this rhyme is an American thing. I never heard it until I came to live in America. When I was a child in England in the 1950s and '60s the word was always “nigger”. There were no black people about in my world, or most British children’s world at that time, to be offended, and as kids we certainly did not see the word as a racist attack on anyone. (It was not a word that we would have used or even necessarily understood out of the context of that rhyme, which also contained at least one other word otherwise not in the normal vocabulary of a British schoolkid, “hollered”.)
Clarkson, who is not much younger than me, may well have never heard the version that substitutes “tiger”, which may explain why he had to invent his own substitution of “teacher”.
I’m 50 and never heard the offensive version until recently. Not sure how I managed to be sheltered from it but it’s very jarring to hear the n-word in what I still think of as an innocent children’s rhyme.
Apparently not, judging by the Wikipedia link Mangetout gave. Why did you think so, and why did you spell it the way you did in the thread title?
Eeny meeny miny moe
Catch a [insert any group you consider contemptible] by the toe
If he hollers let him go
Eeny meeny miny moe
I too learned the N version in the nursery and it still plays as that in my head, whatever else is substituted.
I agree with this analysis (with the trivial exception that it was ‘squeals’ in place of ‘hollers’) - as I say the rhyme was still in use when I went to school in the 70s - and Clarkson went to school between the times you and I did.
I just avoid the rhyme entirely myself - and this is what JC probably should have done, if he’d thought it through more carefully, but he’s not famous for thinking things through carefully.
Well, it seems to me a reasonable supposition that everything tacky or annoying starts with the French. 
OTOH, some people think a little faux française gives everything a bit of the “I don’t know what”.
No. It didn’t come from the French. It came from Kipling. (Or, at least, was popularized by him.)
I am continually stunned that I have known of and used this rhyme in friggin SOUTH CAROLINA of all places for 30 years, and had to learn on the Dope that some people say things other than “tiger” for that second line.
I swear, we’re not the most politically correct people, but if you went out on the street and asked people to recite that rhyme, EVERYONE would say “Catch a tiger” and I bet they wouldn’t have to pause or mutter or stutter to do it, either.
I’m 38, and grew up learning both versions at the same time in the late 70s/early 80s in Chicago. I seem to remember learning the “nigger” variant first.
The wikipedia article conflates all the counting-out rhymes with the same first line. Though there are other substitutions for the N-word in early sources, it’s not clear whether THIS rhyme (with the hollering and letting go) began with the N-word or not. There tends to be a bias in Victorian sources against coarse material, particularly for children, so it’s genuinely difficult to say. I’m inclined to think it was originally the N-word.
As a kid (1970s San Diego) I only knew the tiger version, though I can remember getting in severe trouble with a neighbor for using it. He didn’t explain why, just told us never to use it again.
The version that plays in my head still has the n word in it, so that must have been how I first learned it, though I also have a version rattling around up there with Tigger instead. Tiger never caught on. As a kid, it was just a word. I knew it was bad, but I didn’t know why or how or the implications of what it meant. It would seem in my neighbourhood there was at least an attempt to make the rhyme less offensive, though we all still knew what the ‘real’ word was.
Growing up in the northeast, it was completely OK to say the rhyme, but I only ever heard tiger as a kid. Here’s the rhyme we used (and my kids still use):
Eeny meeny miney moe
Catch a tiger by the toe
If he hollers, let him go
My mother says to pick this one
And out goes “y” “o” “u”
You point at a different person for each syllable throughout and whoever the “u” lands on is out.
By the time I heard the bad version (as an adult), I assumed that it started with tiger and was change to <bad word> during some intervening racist time. I think that’s because I tend to assume that all of the nursery rhymes started a long time ago in England, and that bad word was primarily used here, AFAIK.
I grew up hearing it with “catch a monkey by the toe” (and very rarely, with “catch a tiger by the toe”). I didn’t hear the racist version until much, much later.
The Wikipedia article traces it back to circa 1888 America, and a look at Google N-gram agrees – for some reason, the earliest versions with almost the same wording seem to start at 1888 in the US, although counting rhymes with the same meter and similar nonsense words go back much earlier. Although everyone says the rhyme is American, this 1889 article points out that the "Eeny Meenty, Miney… opening points to a German origin, sand cites a version that begins “Eena, Meena, Moca, Miler” from Cornwall.
But the racist version, according to all sources, seems to come from post-Civil War USA.
I didn’t know there was an alternate to “Tiger” until some time in the 90s.
It was “catch a baby by the toe” when I was young in the early 90s.
Isn’t this kind of thing just Clarkson’s schtick, though? Say something mildly racist or offensive, get his face in the news, apologize, say it was a misunderstanding or a joke, have the BBC apologize and ensure everyone that it’s unacceptable and will never happen again, get some more people to watch Top Gear, rinse, repeat?
Like others, I was totally unaware of the “n-word” version until probably my late-20s. In fact I didn’t even hear the “n-word” itself until well into college.
I grew up with ‘tiger by the toe’.
I was completely unaware of other versions, particularly racist versions, until I learned about it on the SDMB.
I still remember Spanky from Our Gang mixing two rhymes together:
“Mary had a little lamb, her fleece as white as snow. If he hollers let him go, eeni meenie miney moe.”
My experience is the same as Mangetout’s, except I was in Wisconsin, 100 miles from the nearest Black person. We didn’t learn it as an insult. It was just a word to us. As soon as I got old enough to know better, I changed the word in the rhyme.
I envy all you who learned it as ‘tiger’. I fear that one day, when I am an alzheimery old man, I’ll revert it the way I originally learned it, and then wonder why everyone is calling me a racist.