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Friday::Apr 05, 2024

Oral Tradition

G

reat green globs of
greasy grimy gopher guts,
Mutilated monkey meat,
Dirty little birdie's feet,
French-fried fingers
sitting in a pool of blood,
And I forgot my spoon
(And I'm glad I did)..."

I think I learned the above song (whose tune I cannot accurately convey in written words to you, dear reader) at some Summer camp in my youth, and it has remained a refrain that pipes up in the background every so often. The culture of children's rhymes, jokes, songs, and sayings is fascinating -- it's like the effluvia of a proto-society, somehow transmitted and maintained over surprisingly long periods of time with very little adult intervention. Precursor memes and urban legends can fit in here too, many of them obviously relayed almost entirely by children simply due to their primitive structure and nonsensical beats.

I wonder whether this pre-adolescent oral tradition will survive (is surviving) the advent of internet-raised youth. Is it taking a new form, perhaps even a more virulent one? Or is it drowned out by TikTok and YouTube, and their higher production value? I wonder if I'll ever even be able to know -- I remember distinctly that I knew most of the words I heard at camp I shouldn't repeat around my parents...