I don't remember the tiger replacing the N word in that little ditty but I didn't hear the N word version in my yard. My mother must have changed the word herself, teaching it to me thusly: "Catch a piggy by the toe." I look back on little graces like that and smile.
She wanted me to speak properly. When she read aloud this poem to me from Stevenson's Child's Garden of Verses:
A birdie with a yellow bill
Hopped upon my window sill,
Cocked his shining eye and said:
"Ain't you 'shamed, you sleepy-head!"
She said "Aren't you ashamed, you sleep-head." Mother wasn't a metricist!
Not a verse exactly, but there was this little abcedarian chant we little girls used to do when playing with our Spalding balls ("Spaldeens," we called them in the Bronx), bouncing them on the pavement and weaving them through our legs and such:
A my name is Annie
And my father's name is Abe
We come from Alabama
And we sell Apples!
B my name is Bonnie
And my father's name is Bob
We come from Boston
And we sell Biscuits.
The idea was to change the last word in each line at will to any ol' word that came to mind, as long as it began with the right letter.
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