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Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

For us it was:

Eenie meenie minie mo / Catch a tiger by his toe / If he hollers, let him go / My mother said to pick the very best one / And you are not it

I wonder if it's a regional difference -- I'm from Arizona.

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We did the "my mother" one, and this was an easy spot to cheat if you could think quick enough. In that last phrase, you could put in or omit the "not", thus changing the meaning based on who you liked and where the count was about to fall.

The variations with those kinds of elaborations towards the end always seem more amenable to ad-libbing more or less syllables (like "very", or "are not" versus "aren't") to change the result when you see how it'll turn out.

You could try to play tricks like saying "mom" instead of "mother" or something, but anyone with any sense of rhythm would have noticed it was the wrong number of beats.

I lived in Yuma in 3rd-6th grade, 1993-1996. Depending on who was doing the counting, that was often the exact rhyme. The clever ones among us figured out the pattern, and would switch between "and you are it/not it" as necessary to get our way.

I also remember that there was some combination that extended the rhyme but didn't change the result. When I figured that out, it frustrated me that the other kids would still insist on using it.

Brooklyn, 1970s: Eenie meenie minie mo / Catch a tiger by the toe / If he hollers, let him go / My mother said to pick this one

(with the last line being the most common variant I remember, although I think it was common to strategically append things like 'and you are not it')

Also from Arizona:

Eenie meenie minie mo / Catch a tiger by his toe / If he hollers, make him pay / Fifty dollars ev'ry day / My mom said to pick the very best one / And you are it

The "my mother" one was one of the optional additional selection rhymes. This was in the Mississippi river valley of northeastern Missouri / western Illinois.

I grew up in Georgia and this sounds like what I remember.

Central Illinois: same version

I lived in central Illinois for a few years (well, several if you count west central) but during those years I didn't have much need of playground rhymes. If I remain curious about this, though, I have a number of people I could ask for their anecdotes.

I lived in Quincy, then Springfield, then Quincy again.

That's the variation I remember from my childhood in Miami.

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