{"id":2755,"date":"1998-10-11T00:00:00","date_gmt":"1998-10-11T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/1998\/10\/11\/oone\/"},"modified":"2018-01-14T21:24:29","modified_gmt":"2018-01-15T05:24:29","slug":"oone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/1998\/10\/11\/oone\/","title":{"rendered":"OO: Peephole in a Barbed Wire Fence"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n\r\n

In a 1985 column, world's greatest columnist Jon Carroll<\/a> asked for information about the phrase \"I stand before you to sit behind you...\" He was deluged with comments. Like many of his correspondents, I had heard a version of the phrase as a child; it's the start of a contradictory nonsense verse. The verse generally consists of a prologue followed by a brief (though bloody) story.<\/p>\r\n

For this week's column, I performed an extensive Web search on the story part (which usually starts \"One bright day in the middle of the night\"), resulting in over a hundred Web pages which contained some version of the verse; most versions had the same basic structure, but almost every page had some slight difference from other versions.<\/p>\r\n

With the results of that search in hand, combined with a couple of other sources, I now present to you the deluxe edition of the saga of the two dead boys. This version combines what I consider the best (most contradictory and best scansion) pieces of all the versions I've encountered:<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

The famous speaker who no one had heard of said:
\r\nLadies and jellyspoons, hobos and tramps,
\r\ncross-eyed mosquitos and bow-legged ants,
\r\nI stand before you to sit behind you
\r\nto tell you something I know nothing about.
\r\nNext Thursday, which is Good Friday,
\r\nthere's a Mother's Day meeting for fathers only;
\r\nwear your best clothes if you haven't any.
\r\nPlease come if you can't; if you can, stay at home.
\r\nAdmission is free, pay at the door;
\r\npull up a chair and sit on the floor.
\r\nIt makes no difference where you sit,
\r\nthe man in the gallery's sure to spit.
\r\nThe show is over, but before you go,
\r\nlet me tell you a story I don't really know.
\r\nOne bright day in the middle of the night,
\r\ntwo dead boys got up to fight.
\r\n(The blind man went to see fair play;
\r\nthe mute man went to shout \"hooray!\")
\r\nBack to back they faced each other,
\r\ndrew their swords and shot each other.
\r\nA deaf policeman heard the noise,
\r\nand came and killed the two dead boys.
\r\nA paralysed donkey passing by
\r\nkicked the blind man in the eye;
\r\nknocked him through a nine-inch wall,
\r\ninto a dry ditch and drowned them all.
\r\nIf you don't believe this lie is true,
\r\nask the blind man; he saw it too,
\r\nthrough a knothole in a wooden brick wall.
\r\nAnd the man with no legs walked away.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

Many of the Web versions provide titles (such as \"The Backward Rhyme\" or \"Contradiction Poem\"), but almost all of the attributions are to \"anonymous\" or \"unknown,\" with most people having learned it from a relative or as a jump-rope rhyme. Carment Chimento notes: \"This poem was taught to me a long time ago by nobody, but her name escapes me.\" (That version<\/a> is particularly unusual; it goes into more detail (the boys are identical twins, one black and one white) and continues the story: the boys sue the police officer, and the jury sentences them to hang in the electric chair.) One of Jon Carroll's long-ago correspondents said the poem was in a book of verse entitled Rocket in My Pocket<\/cite>; one of the Web pages cited \"The Island of Dr. Brain\" (which I believe was a computer game, and thus certainly not the original source of the rhyme).<\/p>\r\n

Whatever its origins, the verse has obviously long since passed into folklore; comparing the different versions provides a fascinating snapshot of the folk process at work. Some versions are almost certainly misremembered variants of the more standard versions; others are almost certainly mishearings, misinterpretations, or perhaps simply misspellings (as with \"a death policeman\" in one version, and \"through their swords they shot each other\" in another). Some versions provide clearly intentional changes, as in \"Dead Boys,\" a song by a musical group called Isotope Finis<\/a>. The verse has been around the block a time or two; it's known in Alaska, Australia, Boston, California, Indiana, Virginia, and presumably much of the rest of the English-speaking world. (Perhaps readers can tell me if there are non-English versions extant?) It's been around since at least 1940, and is clearly still being passed along. (A surprising number of the Web versions were on \"guest book\" pages.)<\/p>\r\n

These verses are related to other nonsense\/contradictory verses, both folklore and otherwise, from songs like \"Nottamun Town\" (\"From saddle to stirrup I mounted again \/ And on my ten toes I rode over the plain\") to Stephen Foster's \"Oh, Susannah\" (\"It rained so hard the day I left, the weather it was dry; \/ it was so hot I froze to death...\"). British schoolchildren say rhymes like:<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

One midsummer's night in winter
\r\nThe snow was raining fast,
\r\nA bare-footed girl with clogs on
\r\nStood sitting on the grass.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

and<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

I went to the pictures tomorrow
\r\nI took a front seat in the back,
\r\nI fell from the pit to the gallery
\r\nAnd broke a front bone in my back.
\r\nA lady she gave me some chocolate,
\r\nI ate it and gave it her back.
\r\nI phoned for a taxi and walked it,
\r\nAnd that's why I never came back.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

Here's another:<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

'Tis midnight and the setting sun
\r\nIs slowly rising in the west.
\r\nThe rapid rivers slowly run.
\r\nThe frog is on his downy nest.
\r\nThe pensive goat and sportive cow,
\r\nHilarious, leap from bough to bough.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

And one more to end with:<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

While on a Thursday morning, one Sunday night,
\r\nI saw, ten thousand miles away, a house just out of sight.
\r\nIts walls reflected inward, its front was at its back.
\r\nIt stood alone between two more
\r\nand its walls were whitewash black.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

Sources include the aforementioned Jon Carroll column (titled \"I Stand Before You To Sit Behind You\"), dozens of Web pages, and A Book of Puzzlements<\/cite> by Herbert (36 Children<\/cite>) Kohl (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), pp. 98-99, which quotes The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren<\/cite> by Peter Opie (London: Oxford Paperbacks, 1967).<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-4-uuppercase-2"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2755"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2755\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3394,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2755\/revisions\/3394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}