Children’s Folklore Recent Titles in Greenwood Folklore Handbooks Myth: a handbook

Transformations: Th
e Anthropology of Children’s Play 
(1978) offers representative ethnographic reports from Asia, Oceania, the Ameri-
cas, Africa, the Near East, and Europe. Schwartzman covers the main areas of play 
study through the late 1970s, including evolutionary and developmental studies, 
diffusionism, functional analysis, studies of culture and personality, communica-
tion studies, structural and cognition studies, ecology, and ethology (study of ani-
mal behavior).
Recent play studies have reflected openness to new approaches, as well as mul-
ticulturalism and globalization. In 
Th
e Future of Play Th
 eory
(1995), edited by 
Anthony D. Pellegrini, scholars consider play as progress, power, and fantasy; this 
collection of essays honors Brian Sutton-Smith’s accomplishments as a leading 
scholar of play. Another significant study, 
Play and Intervention
(1994), edited 
by Joop Hellendoorn, Rimmert van der Kooij, and Brian Sutton-Smith, explores 
how play therapy helps children with various needs. 
Play Today in the Primary 
School Playground
(2001), edited by Julia C. Bishop and Mavis Curtis, examines 
play among children of different nationalities and ethnicities; it also classifies 
play traditions by verbal, imaginative, and physical content (14). Kalliala’s 
Play 
Culture in a Changing World
(2006) succinctly reviews past play scholarship, pre-
sents examples of Finnish children’s play, and advocates the creation of a rich play 
environment for children (139).

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22 Children’s 
Folklore
Speech Play
Speech play demonstrates children’s joy in manipulating language. While rid-
dles, jokes, rhymes, and songs all involve speech play, folklorists tend to classify 
those forms of children’s folklore as separate genres and to consider shorter utter-
ances, such as slang terms, tongue twisters, and sentences from secret languages, 
as part of the broader genre of speech play. Two excellent surveys of children’s 
speech play are “Children’s Traditional Speech Play and Child Language” by Bar-
bara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Mary Sanches (1976) and “Rhythm, Repetition 
and Rhetoric” by J.D.A. Widdowson (2001).
Folklorists, linguists, and other scholars have traced the development of chil-
dren’s slang, admiring its creativity. Norman Douglas’s 
London Street Games
offers 
diverse terms for games and toys; large marbles, for example, were called 
bons-
ers, bonks, bucks,
or 
bonsters
before 1931 (69). One English slang term, 
cool,
has 
continued to mean “good” since the Beatnik movement of the 1950s. During the 
1990s and the early twenty-first century, 
wicked good, phat,
and 
sick
were terms 
of high praise. The 
Berkeley High School Slang Dictionary,
assembled by students 
in 2004, includes a plethora of terms for “friend,” including 
homey, dude, cousin, 
bro, nizzel,
and 
blood.
There are also many names for marijuana, including 
endoe, 
chronic, dojah, blunt, joint, pinner, pookie, bud,
and 
bammer.
Terms for illegal 
drugs change frequently, since kids hope to avoid parents’ and teachers’ notice. 
June Factor’s 
Kidspeak: A Dictionary of Australian Children’s Words, Expressions and 
Games
(2000) similarly surveys the folk speech of children in Australia.
Tongue twisters challenge children to repeat difficult sequences of sounds. 
Popular English tongue twisters include “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled 
peppers,” “She sells seashells by the seashore,” and “How much wood would a 
woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” Some tongue twisters 
threaten to embarrass the speaker. It is hard to recite the following rhyme without 
saying a forbidden word: “I slit a sheet; a sheet I slit. Upon the slitted sheet I sit” 
(Opie and Opie, 
I Saw Esau
63). With a tongue twister like this one, saying the 
wrong word can give more pleasure to other children than saying the right one.
French children have practiced repeating “Si six scies scient six cigares, six cent 
scies scient six cent cigares” [If six sawyers saw six cigars, six hundred sawyers saw 
six hundred cigars]. For German children, the tongue twister 
(Zungenbrecher)
“Bierbrauer Bauer braut braunes Bier” [Beer brewer Bauer brews brown beer] has 
offered an interesting challenge. Such tongue twisters exist around the world.
Another demonstration of linguistic skill is the spoonerism, which got its 
name from Oxford professor William Archibald Spooner (1844 –1930). Switch-
ing consonants or syllables of adjacent words with each other, children recite a 
rhyme or verse that sounds like nonsense. One example of this genre, popular 
from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s, is “Mardon me, padam, this pie 

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De
fi
nitions and Classi
fi
cations 23
is occupewed. May I sew you to a sheet in another chart of the perch?” [Pardon 
me, madam, this pew is occupied. May I show you to a seat in another part of 
the church?] Other sayings attributed to Spooner include “The Lord is a shoving 
leopard” and “It is kisstomary to cuss the bride.”
Secret languages give children the pleasure of confusing their parents and 
teachers. Since children usually have to figure out the language of adults, it is 
fun for children to make adults struggle to understand their languages. William 
Wells Newell’s detailed description of late nineteenth-century children’s secret 
languages in 
Games and Songs of American Children
shows that some patterns of 
secret-language development have remained relatively similar. Newell explains 
that Hog Latin involves “the addition of the syllable 
ery,
preceded by the sound 
of hard 
g,
to every word.” In Hog Latin, the question “Will you go with me?” 
becomes “Wiggery youggery goggery wiggery miggery?” (24). The term 
Pig Latin
also arose in the nineteenth century. Speakers of Pig Latin in the United States 
move the first consonant or consonant cluster to the end of words and add 
ay.
Children in eastern Finland enjoy using a syllable-switching language called pig’s 
German (Virtanen 34). Closer in form to the Hog Latin language that Newell 
encountered is Op Talk, which involves adding 
op
to each consonant or conso-
nant cluster.
In the 1990s, American teenagers started to use the Izzle language, sometimes 
called Snoop Speak because of its attribution to the rap singer Snoop Doggy 
Dogg. Speakers of this language add the suffix 
izzle
to a word’s initial consonant 
or consonant cluster. 
Sure
becomes 
shizzle,
scrabble
becomes 
scrizzle,
and so on.
Twenty-first-century children in the United States and other nations use letter 
codes to communicate with each other on computers and cellular phones. Many 
e-mails, instant messages (IMs), and mobile text messages include such acronyms 
as LOL (laugh out loud), G2G (got to go), and LMIRL (let’s meet in real life). 
MOS (Mom over shoulder), PAW (parents are watching), and CD9 (code 9) 
warn friends to respond in acronyms that hovering parents will find difficult to 
understand.
Because Web sites like Teenchatdecoder.com help parents understand their 
children’s letter codes, kids continually develop new codes; for example, CD8 
(code 8) may replace the better-known CD9. Stefanie Olsen notes that the ad-
dition of nonsense words such as 
ittica
between acronyms also makes it harder 
for parents to read what their children have written. Coming up with new terms 
gives children the dual pleasure of creating linguistic variations and one-upping 
their parents.
Some text-messaging codes are gender-specific. In Japan, for example, teen-
age girls’ texting, known as Gal Go, creatively combines Japanese characters. Gal 
Go is a specialized form of 
ko-gyaru-go,
“high school girl talk,” which developed 
in Japan in the late 1990s.

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24 Children’s 
Folklore