What Childhood Folklore Did You Learn As a Kid?

I loved this post by Kelsey Miller for Cup of Jo about “childlore”.

“Remember typing ‘BOOBS’ on a calculator?!” someone will blurt. “Or — or that thing when you’re driving by a cemetery and you have to hold your breath?” I love hearing the tiny differences in details (some people grew up lifting their feet off the floor when passing a graveyard). But what’s wild is how many of us grew up doing, drawing, singing, and believing the exact same funny little things: Miss Susie had a steamboat, Batman smelled, the floor was lava, and stepping on cracks broke our mothers’ backs.

For a definition of childlore, let’s go to the Wikipedia:

Childlore is a folklore or folk culture that focuses specifically on children typically between the ages of 6 and 15. As a branch of folklore, childlore is concerned with those activities which are learned and passed on by children to other children; it excludes the stories and tales told and spread by adults. Childlore can include games, riddles, rhymes, oral stories, codes, fantasies, jokes, and superstitions created by children.

Other than what’s already been mentioned, I can’t remember many specific childlore from my childhood (my recall for such things isn’t great). Perhaps some string games? I can still do cat’s cradle & Jacob’s ladder and taught them to my kids when they were younger. Oh and those cootie catchers.

The commenters at Cup of Jo offered several suggestions: the diarrhea song, padiddle (when you saw a car with only one headlight), and slug bug (or punch buggy). And OMG, I gasped when I read this comment — I used to make these little feet all the time!

Just recently on a field trip with my kids we all traveled in a school bus. We live in Wisconsin so it was chilly in the bus and the bus driver had the heater turned on high. The condensation in the bus was freezing on the inside of the windows as it so often does on a winter morning her and then it’s fun to draw things in the frost. My favorite is to press the side of my fist against the glass to make a little footprint and then use my fingers to make toes. It looks like a baby footprint on the window.

What childlore do you remember from your childhood?

• Kelsey Miller
• language