Definitive nonsense

I was amusing myself last night while cleaning the kitchen by remembering the words to a nonsense song from my youth. Nonsense was a definite part of my childhood, with plenty of Edward Lear and Lewis Carrol, but also a goodly amount of the kind passed along by word of mouth. There’s a poem that was passed down through at least four generations of my family as an oral treasure that was never written down. The internet put an end to that fancy when we found it in A Nonsense Anthology, edited by Carolyn Wells and published in 1902¹. It was still fun to memorize and pass along to my children.

But back to last night’s song: more lines and verses came back to me each time I ran the song through my mind. Eventually, work done, I googled the lyrics. Unsurprisingly, there were multiple versions. Oral history gets mangled in repetition, and even if YOU remember the words perfectly, who’s to say the person who taught it to you did?

This morning I have been occupied, while doing chores, with thinking through why MY version is the correct one. (Which is not to say that the way you learned/remembered/sing it is not correct - for you.) I realized that the version I preferred, in every case, was the one which made no sense. If it is a thing that could happen, that explains why that version is remembered, but it cannot be authentic to the song.

Here is my preferred version, with variants and explanations in the notes below:

Jeep²

Oh, I was born one night one morn

When the whistle went boom boom.³

You can fry a cake or bake a steak⁴

When the mud pies are in bloom.

Does six and six make nine?⁵

Does ice grow on a vine?

Is Old Black Joe an Eskimo

In the good ol’ summertime?

Oh, loop-de-loop⁶ in the noodle soup

Just to give your socks a shine.

I’m a guilty judge,⁷ I ate the fudge.

Three cheers for auld lang syne!

I cannot tell a lie

I hocked⁸ an apple pie

It’s in a tree beneath the sea,

Above the deep⁹ blue sky!

If Easter eggs don’t wash¹⁰ their legs

Their children will have ducks (quack quack)

I’d rather buy a lemon pie¹¹

For forty-seven bucks (too much!)

Way down in Barcelonia

I jumped into the phonia¹²

But this is all balonia

Paderewski blow your horn (toot toot)!¹³

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¹Available via Project Gutenberg here, and search on “heart” - you’ll know it when you see it, family! For the rest, it’s To Marie by John Bennett.
²This is the perfect title for a song that has nothing whatsoever to do with vehicles, transportation, or the military. It is often found online as The Nonsense Song, or The Lunatic's Lullaby, which are accurate -- and therefore bad -- titles.
³“Toot toot” is a common variant, but in fact that is precisely what steam whistles do in old cartoons, and therefore cannot be correct. Also, “boom boom” preserves the rhyme scheme.
⁴Variations reverse the order of the foods, but it doesn’t matter as long as the method of cooking is ridiculous.
⁵I didn’t remember these four lines at all. “Old man Joe” is sometimes seen, but Old Black Joe, In the Good Old Summertime, and Auld Lang Syne were all well-known songs in the past.
⁶Sometimes seen as “loop the loop,” possibly a dialectal isogloss.
⁷Sometimes “I’m guilty, judge” but the above version is more nonsensical.
⁸Variations include “hooked” and “hawked,” clearly mondegreens.
⁹Also seen as “bright” and “great,” which of course make too much sense.
¹⁰“Shave” is sometimes seen, which is a bit anachronistic given the likely age of this ditty.
¹¹I remembered “lemon drop,” which destroys the internal rhyme and was clearly influenced by Another Song.
¹²I remembered “foamia,” which makes too much sense to be correct.
¹³Paderewski was a famous pianist, so blowing a horn is the proper nonsense. One version had “red rooster” as a lovely mondegreen.