My mother always used to quote (well, still does quote) from her mother:
Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and no wonder.
All the rest have strawberry jam,
Except for Grandma, and she rides a bike.
From my dad, to my daughters:
Trot, trot to Oostburg to buy a pannekoek
but when we get there, there wasn’t any bake
trot, trot home again, met a big snake
picked up a stone
broke its backbone
and galloped and galloped and galloped and galloped
all the way home
Several I heard from my father.
There ain’t no justice in this fair land,
I just got a divorce from my old man.
He got the kids by the court’s decision,
but the joke’s on him, the kids ain’t hissn.
And,
The rain it falls alike upon the just and unjust fella,
The problem is, the unjust always has the just’s umbrella.
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake…
Wait, what!? If I should die? Well fuck it, I’m not going to sleep then.
:eek:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrgifazVS2U at the 2:00 minute mark.
I am an Old New Englander, borne and bred. This is obviously a Bostonian rhyme.
Oh, so this thread is alive again!
My big brother used to tell a lot of these when we were young’uns, including that “Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear” one.
Here’s another one, but it has a faux-German-sounding word or phrase I could never make out. Maybe someone can fill in the blank(s)?
*My name is Mox,
I sell the socks
For _____________
Cents a box.
The longer you wear them,
The stronger they get.
You dip them in water,
They never get wet!*
He also often quoted this non-sense line: “I had one grunch, but the eggplant over there.” WTF? What’s that supposed to mean? Apparently, this or something similar was out there, because some years later I saw a variation on that in a MAD Magazine.
Also: “Slip, sir, rock, sir, dropsy in the snide!” Now this one (I learned years later) was simply a thoroughly mangled version of a real expression:
It’s crackers to slip a rozzer dropsy in the snide
That’s Cockney-speak for
It’s crazy to bribe a cop with counterfeit money.
From my grandfather:
I went out one morning to call on Miss Brown
She was up in the bath, said she could not come down.
I said “Slip on something, be down in a tick” -
Well, she slipped on the soap and she did come down quick.
From my mother (I suspect from hers, and I wonder about that family):
Augustus was a charming boy,
His father’s pride, his mother’s joy:
He brushed his hair, he brushed his coat,
He cut his nails - and the baby’s throat.