My first meme

[charisma]

It occurs to me that, long before the internet age, I was exposed to the concept of 'meme' on the playground. Songs and stories and drawings and skills that circulated and spread from schoolyard to schoolyard, and also intergenerationally

Comments

[slfcllednowhere]

Interesting post! I think I'm about ten years younger than you so I have a somewhat different frame of reference for this stuff. But the Cinderella kissing a snake song was also a jumprope song my friends and I would sing (though I would never be the jumper, cos I never learned how to jump rope!) and we had a version of the Navy song from your dad that turned into a school song for you at my Girl Scout camp. It would be really interesting to do a full serious study of this kind of stuff!

[shaharazad]

I remember some of those!

The other schoolyard rhyme that I always remember from some girls on the school bus was this important bit of etiquette:

Bow to the King
Curtsy to the Queen
Show your legs to the US Marine