People who know me won’t be surprised that I have a keen interest in folklore, including the folklore of children.
Any Gen Xer can tell you about the Kentucky Fried Rat. A woman -- and it was always a woman -- choked while eating a bucket of KFC in a movie theater. When she was brought out into the light, they found (dramatic pause) a breaded, fried, and half-eaten rat!!
We would have also heard -- in hushed tones -- the sad fate of Mikey, or at least the actor who played him in the Life cereal commercials. Poor lad’s stomach exploded after consuming Pop Rocks washed down with a Coke. This was accepted as Gospel truth.
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| The "Cool S" |
Then there was the “cool S”, that angular sigil made from two sets of three vertical lines. As someone named Steven, you can bet my notebooks were all emblazoned with it.
What about the songs?
Jingle Bells
Batman smells
Robin laid an egg
The Batmobile
lost a wheel
And the Joker got away
Hey!
Or this one:
Do your balls hang low?
Can you swing ‘em to and fro?
Can you tie ‘em in a knot?
Can you tie ‘em in a bow?
Can you beat your meat on the toilet seat?
Do your balls
Hang
Low?
Then there was another version. Maybe they were two verses. I definitely heard various combinations of the above with the following, funnier version:
Do your balls hang low?
Can you drag ‘em in the snow?
Can you tie ‘em in a knot?
Can you tie ‘em in a bow?
Can you swing ‘em over yer shoulder like a Continental soldier?
Do your balls
Hang
Low?
Which version do you remember?
Then there was this little ditty, which would likely get a kid expelled today:
Hi ho!
Hi ho!
It’s off to school we go!
With hand grenades and razor blades,
Hi ho!
Hi ho!
I was a military brat. I went to elementary school in Hawaii, South Carolina, and Naples, Italy. I heard these things in all those places. Military brats diffused this stuff easily because kids I went to school with had equally, if not even more itinerant childhoods. Maybe we were the ones responsible for spreading them across the country in the first place; indeed the world. Wherever American kids’ parents were stationed for that two or three years.
Thoughts?