Yep. This is what I am familiar with as well. Long Island/New York City here. I have *never *heard the nigger version in real life. The only place I’ve ever even seen that is here on this board. In fact I’ve never heard any colloquial sayings that use the word “nigger” like “nigger in the woodpile” or “nigger-rigged” or anything like that ever spoken aloud.
Never heard of “nigger in the woodpile,” nor do I know what it means (though I will in a second when I look it up), but “nigger-rigged” was not unheard of (though “jerry-rigged” is the term I’m most familiar with.) That also reminds me, there was a rough version of basketball some people played where fouls weren’t called that was known as “niggerball” in the neighborhood.
A sanitized version of “nigger-rigged” that I’ve heard is “afro-engineered.”
Somewhat the same as ‘fly in the ointment’ or ‘gremlin in the system’.
My boss at my previous place of work was using this one as recently as five years ago (probably still is now).
I don’t know if you’re familiar with Jeremy Clarkson - it sounds like maybe not - his onscreen persona (and maybe IRL too), he is the archetypical bloke-ish, brash, opinionated lout.
It’s not so much a question of whether he cares or not about any specific issue, but in fact, whether the issue even exists on his radar. If he’d thought it through deeply enough in advance, he’d probably have just tossed a coin instead of using this rhyme.
But he is neither a deep, nor particularly forward-thinking person, and so he frequently blunders into trouble of this and many other kinds. Not sure what you can actually do about that.
You lost me again.
I’m guessing that it’s Leo-speak for “why does the thread title employ French spelling?”, but I’m only a beginner at the language.
In my opinion, he’s not so much a racist as simply your usual haughty westerner poking fun at Asians, Africans, Arabs, etc. A bit like Teri Hatcher in “Desperate Housewives” asking her doctor for an (American) diploma in medicine, to make sure he didn’t get his from the Philippines.
Back to Clarkson, one instance that cracked me up was one with a Malaysian-made car: “It was made in a jungle clearing by a man who used to pull an ox!”
I am guessing that that is a function of age or when you grew up.
Growing up in the 1950s, I first heard “tiger” in the eeny rhyme some time around 1970 and figured that it was a deliberate effort to “clean up” the rhyme. (At about the same time, Morris Turner ran a strip of his Wee Pals comic in which one of the kids (a multi-racial group), began counting "Eeny, Meeny, Miney, . . . " and Randy, one of the black kids, walked off saying that he was not going to enjoy the game.)
Up until the 1970s, I often heard “nigger in the woodpile.” “Nigger-rigged” is a phrase I rarely heard and, again, not since the early 1970s, but I knew a couple of old-time maintenance men who used it. The crews of the ships on which I was a sailor (1971, 1972) routinely called timberheads “niggerheads.” (I actually had to look up their “real” name after I got off the boat at the end of my first summer. None of the guys ever said anything but nigger head.)
(Side note on jury-rigged and jerry-built.)
I also learned it as Tiger, from children’s television programming, with a variation that I’ve not seen mentioned. For more than two items, it was a multi-verse rhyme.
Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Moe
Catch a tiger by the toe
If he hollers, make him pay
Fifty dollars every day
My mother told me to choose the very best one
And you are not it.
The one I think sounds most original ends with
If he hollers, let him go
Eeny Meeny, Miney, Mo.
BTW, anyone else remember figuring out how it would end from the beginning and either skipping the rhyme or deliberately starting with the one you wanted?
I grew up in Australia in the '80s and learnt the n-word version.
Our version ended with "if he hollers, let him go. Eeny, Meeny, Miney Mo.
I was always confused by it, because I thought it was nicker and assumed it was talking about catching someone stealing. It never made sense to me to let him go just for hollering.
Not exactly, but I remember always being puzzled about how people thought that something so formulaic could produce a random result.
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe in Pulp Fiction. (NSFW)
If you have a counting-out rhyme and a varying number of participants from time to time, you may be aware that the result should be predictable but not know the outcome well enough to be able to predict it at the time. That’s generally good enough for nine-year-olds, in my experience.