I've just spent a good hour or so chuckling at some of the rhymes and songs listed in the Dictionary of Playground Slang. I was familiar with most of them, although it startles me that here I was, all of six years old, singing things like (to the tune of 'Tragedy' by the Bee Gees) "It's a tragedy, When you have a fuck and your dick gets stuck, It's a tragedy!" Or (to the tune of 'Seasons in the Sun') "We had joy, we had fun, we had candles up our bum, But the joy didn't last 'cause the wicks were too long."
I can't imagine I had the first idea what I was singing about.
I mean, I knew the mechanics behind sex. My mum handed me a copy of "Where Did I Come From" and scurried off very early on. (Although I misunderstood the description a bit and thought that willies moved up and down all by themselves, a bit like a horizontal metronome, which I thought was pretty darn clever. Imagine my disappointment…) But I really don't think I had a clue about what was really going on.
I distinctly remember walking through a shopping centre carpark with my mum and my grandparents around that age and being puzzled by a bumper sticker I'd read. I asked her, loudly, to explain to me how you could save mice by eating pussies. So I definitely hadn't added two and two together, as it were. Although it makes me wonder if that humiliating experience led to Mum asking me to explain this.
I also remember being a little older and being asked "What do you do if an elephant comes through your window?" (Answer: Start swimming) by an older step-cousin and pretending to get it, even though I had no clue what they were on about. But it was in front of one of my step-sisters and she didn't get it and if you thought I was going to stand there and look uncool in front of her, you'd have another thing coming. Er, other than the elephant.
Anyway, it was a laugh reading through some of the rhymes and the regional variations that are around. So tell me some of the songs you used to sing in the playground.
Monkey Business
Erm… managed to lose about 7
last week. Quite a lot, really, but with the virus and accompanying nausea, it was pretty simple. I imagine most of them will be back next week.
What's all this monkey business about then?
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