November 12, 2007 | parenthood
I’ve been in the UK for about fifteen years now, and I’d thought I’d finished discovering those mildly amusing differences in language between American English and British English. In the first few years I learned about sidewalks and pavements, trunks and boots, suspenders and braces, and of course the endlessly-hilarious pants and trousers.
Then I started being a professional writer and I learned about the differences between fit and fitted, snuck and sneaked, and the more subtle fix and make.
I thought I was comfortably bi-lingual in English.
Now I am a mother and I am learning a whole new world of differences. There’s diapers and nappies, of course, and also strollers and pushchairs, pacifiers and dummies (though I don’t use those, Fecklet sucks his thumb), crib and cot, to burp and to wind.
But there’s more than that. Did you know that the tune to “Baa baa black sheep” is slightly different in each country? Did you know that the Americans do “The Hokey Pokey” and the English do the “Hokey Cokey,” and the English leave out the reflexive pronoun in “turn yourself around”? Did you know that even “Eensy Weensy Spider” has different words and a whole new line at the end?
I am endlessly disoriented.
Rosalind Mitvhell says:
Eventually, of course, you will discover that there is no such thing as ‘British English’, that Scottish English is as different from English Englsh as American English is (’outwith’ for ‘apart from’, ‘do the messages’ for ‘do the shopping’), that Welsh English has peculiar inflections of its own, and as for what is poken in the barbaric parts east of the Pennines from here…
The rhymes I know are:
Baa baa black sheep
Have you any wool?
Yes sir, no sir,
Three bags full.
One for the master
And one for the dame
And one for the little boy
Who lives down the lane.
and
Incey Wincey Spider
Climbed the water spout
Down came the rain and
Washed the spider out
Out came the sun and
Dried up all the rain
Incey Wincey Spider
Climbed up the sput again.
What are the American versions?
Oh, I’m glad you don’t give Fecklet a dummy. My Karen did very nicely without one!
Julie says:
The rhyme for Baa Baa is the same. The tune is different. In American the tune is exactly the same as “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”.
And I say “went” for “climbed” in the spider one. Again, there’s a slightly different tune. And they inserted a final line about touching your knees or something at playgroup last week.
Yes, I should have said “New England American English, specifically as spoken in inland Maine” and “Southern England English, specifically as spoken in the area of Reading, Berkshire” but I was trying to save time.
And I wasn’t talking about dialect so much as standard English for both countries. Dialect is a whole different kettle of fish.
MichelleStyles says:
Ah, you are just starting.
What about Ring a Ring Roses?
The Hokey Cokey always does my head in as I do want to sing Hokey Pokey, but was told in no uncertain terms that was rude.
Even London Bridges is played differently.
I remember those days…and really feeling like I was a foriegn land. So sending hugs.
MichelleStyles says:
PS
I should say that I felt better when a friend who had moved up from Devon confessed that she felt foreign as well up in Northumberland. And she said that at least I knew I was an alien, whereas she had never suspected…
Kate Hardy says:
This is interesting stuff, Julie. (And I can tell you LOADS of songs with my PRESMA trustee hat on *g*) I’ve been singing the Hokey Cokey in my head (and the version I know uses a reflexive pronoun).
Did you know that ‘hokey pokey’ was a form of ice cream over here in the early 1950s? There’s a rhyme about it but I can only remember about half of it (my mum told me). I think it had lots of ice chips in it.
I can’t imagine BBBS sung to TTLS. I want a demo next time I see you. (Or you can sign it down the phone. I don’t mind…) There’s also the Spanish version of TTLS which is lovely. And the comedy version:
Twinkle, twinkle, chocolate bar
My dad drives a rusty car.
Pull the lever, push the choke
Off we go in a puff of smoke.
Twinkle, twinkle, chocolate bar
My dad drives a rusty car.
Don’t get me started. I might have to sneak these in a book…
Harriet says:
We do:
Twinkle twinkle chocolate bar
my daddy drives a rusty car
there he goes, into town,
with his trousers falling down
Twinkle twinkle chocolate bar
my daddy drives a rusty car.
And I assume you were being arch in your use of disoriented??!
Julie says:
I can never get “disoriented” and “disorientated” straight. Ah…I just looked it up and that’s because “disoriented” is the American version.
Point proven.
It’s good to see there’s so much intellectual activity going on in your house, Harriet. And yours, Kate.
I sing the Alice in Wonderland version. Twinkle, twinkle, little bat…
In a completely American aside, we used to sing, to the tune of the national anthem of the United States of America:
Oh, say can you see
Fonzie taking a pee?
Oh peanut butter and jelly,
I can see his big belly.
Julie says:
Michelle, I want to know why Hokey Pokey is rude…! It really is confusing, though, isn’t it, when something you know so well is known equally well by someone else in a totally different version. It sort of makes me wonder if I remember my own childhood aright.
Kate Hardy says:
Rude? Oh, c’mon. With the books you write, you should get that
Julie says:
It seemed too obvious to be plausible.
And anyway, why is “hokey pokey” rude and not the specifically English line “in, out, in, out, shake it all about”?
Nell Dixon says:
Or
Twinkle twinkle little bat
How I wonder what you’re at
Up above the world so high
Like a teatray in the sky
Twinkle twinkle little bat
How I wonder what you’re at
Jenny Haddon says:
I think “hokey pokey” originates as a Street Cry for ice cream.
My elderly family used to talk about the Italian vendors who used to sell ice cream from a cart in Edwardian England. They mainly worked London, but one or two other places as well - including Scoltand, hence the Forte family.
I don’t think anyone knows what were the original words of the cry, though people posit something like: ‘[Gelato] Ecco un poco!’
The second bit of the cry was,according to my father, apparently, ‘Penny a poke.’ To me that looks like the Italian traders adopting the foreigners’ Malapropism and selling it right back to them. It has quite a nice rhythm, of course: “Hokey Pokey, penny a poke.”
I suspect what then happened was that the innocent phrase “penny a poke” became code for something quite different during the First World War. So, young soldiers on furlough from the Front, stroll through Soho, see a girl and ask, ‘Hokey Pokey?’
Possibly false, but it pleases me. NOT the best academic rigour, I know.
MichelleStyles says:
I like Jenny’s explanation. It sounds plausible. I should probably look at my copy of Dear Olivia which is Mary Contini’s second book about her family and the conditions they lived in when they emigrated to Scotland from Italy in the early 20th century. They founded and run Valvona and Crolla. The first book has fantastic recipes but the second focuses on their experience.
The pokey v cokey thing bothered me and for a long time as I wondered if I had remembered it wrong But then realised I hadn’t. And that is hokey pokey in the US.
Isn’t it wonderful when a children’s music session becomes a lesson in pondering linguistics.
Liz Fielding says:
Do you mean that fine old English rhyme, “Incy Wincy Spider”? Two countries divided by a single language… Yes, indeed. But since we always take on the invaders language and fold it into our own, I guess you’ll win!
Liz Fielding says:
Jenny’s comment about ice cream strikes a chord. My dh still says “hokey pokey, penny a lump” when referring to ice-cream. Remembered from a very long ago childhood, apparently. Or maybe it was one of his grandad’s sayings.
Kate Hardy says:
“Hokey pokey, penny a lump” is what my mum told me (a long time ago now obviously, and again for obvious reasons I can’t corroborate it). The second line is “the more you eat, the more you jump” but I can’t remember the rest of it.
Kate Hardy says:
PS I meant to say, I like Jenny’s explanation
Julie says:
I never knew any of this. Cool.
Except I did know fellow bat Nell’s version…
Biddy says:
Moving the States as a ten year old confused me no end, especially the hokey pokey/cokey thing (thought I was going mad). And we won’t go in to the day I asked to borrow someone’s rubber instead of eraser… the looks!!
Kate Johnson says:
Oh yes, it’s always fun. My Texan friend calls it ‘culture exchange’. Since I’m English but my publishers are American, I have to rely on her and my editor to make sure my books are intelligible accross the pond (it’s debatable how intelligible they are anywhere, to be honest, but that’s by the by).
I live in the south, but my family is from the north, and we have occasional giggle-fests over the differences in language. Luckily, I’m bilingual: I speak Yorkshire enough to get by
Oh…and I just tried to remember how I sing Baa Baa Black Sheep, and the tune I’m coming up with sounds a lot like Twinkle Twinkle. But then, it’s been a long time since I had any cause to sing it…
Fiona says:
My challenge is teenage language.
According to his bebo account - which he has no idea that I know the password also - my second son is: 13, male, into: football,cricket, girls what are fit - no mingers.
I’m sure thirteen year old girls might know what he means but would they want to?
Julie says:
“Minger” is one of my favourite slang words. Though I prefer “mingin”.
amanda ashby says:
It’s Hokey Pokey in Australian but in New Zealand it’s Hokey Cokey - however, they have an ice-cream flavor called hokey cokey (with caramel and honeycomb in - very nice) so perhaps that is why. Also, I’m very impressed that you know what comes from where. After living in 3 countries over the last 15 years not to mention writing for US publishers, I have lost all track of what comes from where!!!
Julie says:
I usually don’t know which is which either, Amanda. It’s only because this is new and because I keep on going to toddler group and singing the wrong thing and having people look at me funny.
I wonder why it’s different in Australia and New Zealand.
Jenny, I don’t understand though why if it started with Italian ice cream vendors in England, it’s changed to “Hokey Cokey” in the UK and stayed “Hokey Pokey” in US?
Julie says:
I do remember reading a great book about differences and spreading of nursery rhymes by some Opies, though that was mostly in England. I guess these songs are the biggest source of folklore we have in daily life (urban legends and email frauds being the adult source of folklore) and so are endlessly variable.
BTW, every website I can find lists “Baa Baa Black Sheep” as having the same tune as “Twinkle Twinkle”–but these are all US sites.
Julie says:
(All we ever said for ice cream was “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream.”)
(Not so dissimilar to what happens around here on a regular basis, then.)
Jenny Haddon says:
The wonderful Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words site has some interesting thoughts on “hokey Pokey”, in particular: “A report appeared in The Daily News of Frederick, Maryland, in July 1887:
The custom of eating ice-cream in England is so popular that even the dirty arabs of the street are bound to have their ‘penny wipe,’ as they call it, which consists of a dab of the refreshing delicacy on a piece of questionably clean paper. This mode of retailing ices has crept into New York and Chicago, and is possibly an humble offshoot of the Anglomania now so prevalent throughout the United States. Somewhat similar to this method of selling ices on the street is the custom now in vogue in the cities, and used to be in Frederick, of retailing the ‘poor relation’ of ice cream known as Hokey Pokey, by the boys with hand carts.”
http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-hok1.htm
He doesn’t answer the question why the UK did a consonontal shift and the US didn’t. But he says that the British okey-cokey (alt: hokey-cokey, cokey-cokey) was a dance-hall song apparently composed by Jimmy Kennedy in the UK in 1942. It was certainly a popular dance in wartime. Even a website that claims the song/dance is ‘traditional’ admits ‘Sheet music copyrighted in 1942 and published by Campbell Connelly & Co Ltd, agents for Kennedy Music Co Ltd, styles the song as “the Cokey Cokey”.’
Nothing to link it to the wartime dance to ice-cream.
A nearly identical song surfaces in the US in 1949, then attributed to Larry LaPrise and called “Hokey-pokey’. (Allegedly it was written as a novelty dance for the skiers at Sun Valley,Idaho.) Plagiarism? LaPrise, Charles Macak and Tafit Baker were apparently granted copyright for the song in 1950.
So maybe the change was deliberate, rather than a mondegreen, and designed to get round copyright laws.
Murky stuff.
Lucy says:
My godmother taught me this (when I was about ten)…
Starkle starkle little twink.
Who the hell you are you think.
I’m not under the alfluence of incahol,
Though some thinkle peep I am.
I fool so feelish
I know not who is me.
The drunker I sit here, the longer I get.
Interesting choice of godmother on my parents’ part!
Julie says:
They probably felt you could do with a different perspective. I suspect I may be that sort of a godmother…
Hmm, Jenny. Do you think one could get away with that sort of thinly-veiled copyright dodging today? I am thinking of maybe writing Parry Hotter.
(Possibly inspired by Lucy’s godmother)