Originality
From Iona & Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren:
The children themselves often have a touching faith in the novelty of their oral acquisitions. Of the rhyme,
House to let, apply within / Lady turned out for drinking gin,
which we have collected from twenty-four places in the British Isles, also from South Africa, Australia, and the United States, and which was recorded as traditional in 1892 (G.F. Northall, English Folk-Rhymes, p. 306) an Alton girl remarked: ‘Here’s one you won’t know because it’s only just made up.’ Of the couplet,
Mrs. Mason broke a basin / How much did it cost?
lines which are the recollection of a counting-out formula recorded in 1883 (G.F. Jackson, Shropshire Folk-lore, p. 573), a Birmingham child vouched the newness because it was ‘named after a teacher’s wife’. Children are, in fact, prone to claim the authorship of a verse when they have done no more than alter a word in it, for instance substitute a familiar name for a name unknown to them; and they tend to be passionately loyal to the presumed genius of a classmate, or of a child who has just left their school, who is credited with the invention of each newly heard composition. The unromantic truth, however, is that children do not ‘go on inventing games out of their heads all the time’, as Norman Douglas believed; for the type of person who is a preserver is rarely also creative, and the street child is every bit as conservative as was George VI with his lifelong preference for the hymns he sang in the choir at Dartmouth. The nearest the normal child gets to creativeness is when he stumbles on a rhyme, as we have overheard: an 8-year-old, playing in some mud, suddenly chanted ‘Stuck in the muck, stuck in the muck’, whereupon his playmates took up the refrain, ‘Stuck in the muck, stuck in the muck’. A 10-year-old added:
It’s a duck, it’s a duck, / Stuck in the muck, stuck in the muck,
and the group echoed this too, and went on chanting it, spasmodically, with apparent satisfaction, for above an hour, so that it seemed certain that we were in at the birth of a new oral rhyme. But when we asked them about it a week later they did not know what we were talking about. The fact is that even a nonsense verse must have some art and rhythm in it if it is to obtain a hold on a child’s mind, although exactly what the quality is which gives some verses immortality is difficult to discover.
