At Accardo, you'll save 25% on your first shop and get free delivery, which means if you were to buy a four cheese pizza, you'd basically be getting one of the cheeses for free.

Save and splurge at Accardo, the online supermarket.

Geographical and other restrictions. Min spend £60 on charge to apply. Discound available on food, new customers only.

Max saving £20.000. Terms at Accato.com. On May 16th, join Martha and Me as we go to Dallas, Texas,

to the Lakewood Theater for a live event.

In conjunction with Aberg Center,

a literacy organization and K-E-R-A.

You can get tickets and more information

at AbergCenter.org.

That's A-B-E-R-G center.org. You're listening to Away with Words,

the show about language, and how we use it. I'm Grant Barrett. And I'm Martha Barnett.

As long as we've had schoolyards, we've had schoolyard rhymes. Those rhythmic sing-song verses are one

way that children poke fun and test limits.

And a lot of those rhymes, of course, are crude, and some of them, unfortunately, are quite cruel.

The other ones, the ones that I'm drawn to, are just plain silly.

When you think back to your own days on the playground, what verses come to mind?

For me, it's things like Johnny and Mary sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G, first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage. And I guess a lot of these verses were about trying to figure out at that age what love and babies had to do with each other. Ah, very good. And I also remember the taunting back and forth between the sexes grant do you remember

this one boys are rotten made out of cotton girls are handy made out of candy boys go to jupiter to get

more stupider girls go to mars to get more candy bars I learned that from my niece Madison actually

I never knew that one of my own years really well I know you love these things I do yeah the songs

are the ones that I love we did all the glory, glory, hallelujah that we made up and the ones that traveled around. Yeah. Glory, glory hallelujah. Teacher hit me with the ruler. Shot her in the butt with the rotten coconut and she don't teach no more. Oh, awful stuff. And we made up like 15 or 20 verses. Yeah. Some of them we thought we made up, but they just were traveling in the ether from year to year, student to students, school to school, right? Yeah, yeah. We sang a different version of that. All this stuff. But it is. It's about you are the least powerful person in your life. Your parents have power.

Your teachers have power. The older students have power. The bus driver has power, right? Yep, yep. And it is a way of kind of undermining the authority structures around you by mocking them gently, sometimes not so gently. Yeah, yeah. And just trying to figure it all out, too. We'd love to hear your playground rhymes. what are the things that you said when you were in school,

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