Example of kids' oral culture - can anyone recall?

[Lee Scoresby]

I have always been interested in those terms, jokes and little games and phrases which spread among people, especially kids and adolescents, under the radar. Rock-paper-scissors, all of that.

Right now, I'm trying to recall a sort of analysis game where 3 questions are asked. I remember one is: What kind of animal would you like to be? Another might be: What kind of animal do you think you are? The third might be a favourite colour. Something like that, don't recall - that's the point.

According to this little piece of folk character divination, one can thereby deduce how the person seems, how they really are inside, something else . . . something like that.

Can anyone remember? Feel free to raise any other little piece of kid's oral culture you know of.

A warm little corner in a cold world.

Lee Scoresby

[Sue]

Lee Scoresby Wrote:

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>

> Right now, I'm trying to recall a sort of analysis

> game where 3 questions are asked. I remember one

> is: What kind of animal would you like to be?

> Another might be: What kind of animal do you think

> you are? The third might be a favourite colour.

> Something like that, don't recall - that's the

> point.

>

> According to this little piece of folk character

> divination, one can thereby deduce how the person

> seems, how they really are inside, something else

> . . . something like that.

I don't think that was a kids' game.

I think it was some sort of cod psychology/new agey thing in the seventies or eighties.

>

[Loz]

Lee Scoresby Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> I have always been interested in those terms,

> jokes and little games and phrases which spread

> among people, especially kids and adolescents,

> under the radar. Rock-paper-scissors, all of

> that.

>

> Right now, I'm trying to recall a sort of analysis

> game where 3 questions are asked. I remember one

> is: What kind of animal would you like to be?

> Another might be: What kind of animal do you think

> you are? The third might be a favourite colour.

> Something like that, don't recall - that's the

> point.

There was something like that with the folded paper thing.

ETA: Found it - the fortune teller. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_fortune_teller

[goosey-goosey]

Lee, you might find this useful (cited in the above Mrs Wikipedia link):

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=sdWwHbOf4oAC&pg=PA341&redir_esc=y

[Lee Scoresby]

Loz, the salt-cellar I remember little girls doing a lot in my NZ childhood in the 60s. Not sure they called it that, as we didn't call the salt dispenser a 'cellar', if you see what I mean. Thanx for showing me that page.

All sorts of things: knuckle-bones, skipping rhymes, group songs/chants (the girls); model land-sailers, marbles, tops, rough games like King of Sinai (pronounced 'Kinga-see-nee') and 'He' (called 'It' here in England) (the boys) - pre-digital amusement, in the real, physical, gloriously grubby world. (Blimey o'reilly, I'm sounding like some reminiscent geriatric. Shoot me now.)

Goosey, I am familiar with the Opies, also the work of Bruno Bettelheim. Many thanx for that.

Sue, it was indeed more a teen than a child thing - which surely overlaps with 'new agey' - and it was about that time period.

Lee S