When I was a child, and in a group picking sides for football, cricket, rounders, or whatever, we always used the 'n' word in our Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Mo rhyme. Phil is right when he says you can't forget something learned so early and used so frequently. All you can do as an adult is not use the rhyme any more. There was another choosing rhyme common in Lancaster at that time, which was Dip, Dip, Dip, My Blue Ship, Sailing On The Water, Like A Cup And Saucer, Dip, Dip, Dip. Both were in common use, and essentially interchangeable.philcom55 wrote:I'd never even heard of the 'tiger' variation before this week! When something is burned into your memory in that way at such an early age it becomes impossible to unlearn - however much you'd like to.
There is an irony about the negative vibes associated with the 'n' word, which became derogatory and dismissive of black people when the plantation owners in the American Deep South were using entire black families as slaves, something of that attitude still being widely evident today, because the word is etymologically accurate. It derives from the Latin word niger, meaning black, which became negro in Spanish at some point during the long Roman occupation. It will then have been used to describe the next major conquerors, the dark-skinned Moors, who were only expelled at roughly the same time as the Spaniards were conquering Mexico and Peru, and imposing their language on the inhabitants, a situation that obtains there today all over South and Central America except Brazil, who were conquered by Portugal, and therefore now speak Portuguese. It is not difficult to see how easily the word would then travel north into areas of the Deep South such as Louisiana and Alabama. The rest is history.