Childlore is folklore passed directly between children, without the input of adults.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childlore
Stuff I can think of off the top of my head are paper fortune tellers, summoning Bloody Mary/the candyman, the cool S, parody songs like “Jingle bells Batman Smells” and “Joy to the world, the teacher’s dead” etc.
This stuff has intrigued me since, well since I was a kid. I always wondered where they came from. I never saw adults doing that stuff, so I figured another kid had to have come up with it.
Hold your breath when you pass the graveyard, or go through a tunnel.
Lift your feet off the ground when a vehicle you’re in goes under the train tracks.
If you sharpen a pencil really sharp, you can stick it into a ceiling tile and it will stay there.
Chew up some paper and you can spit it at someone through a straw as a spitball.
How to fold a paper fortune teller, and play it. For some reason my classmates labeled it with the different kinds of sex acts we had heard of but didn’t really understand. (Kissing, sex, 69, blowjob…)
How to play MASH.
How to play tag.
The rumor that existed in every single school that Marilyn Manson had a rib removed so he could suck his own penis
That rumor came up in his autobiography and he wrote -
“If I really got my ribs removed, I would have been busy sucking my own dick on The Wonder Years instead of chasing Winnie Cooper. Plus, who really has time to be killing puppies when you can be sucking your own dick? I think I’m gonna call the surgeon in the morning.”
Side note: Marilyn Manson is a peice of shit.
I’m out of the loop on that one, why is he a piece of shit?
A bunch of women accused him of sexual violence, but nothing is showing up on his wiki.
He also seems to have been a bit of a dick to bandmates
he basically raped and tortured Evan Rachel Wood. there were many others, but she was the highest profile victim.
He… he was on the wonder years?
No, but there was a rumour back in the day that he was the kid who played Kevin’s best friend.
For my generation this was about Prince
So many gaming ones.
When mortal kombat was released for consoles, the kids passed the “blood code” for the genesis
When mortal kombat 2 came out, their were so many myths about super fatalities and weird stuff about how street fighter was in it.
Man oh man I could probably have a whole thread just for video game urban legends from the late 90s. That’s when some of your friends had internet, but maybe you didn’t, so there was just enough legit info to make the fake stuff seem believable (looking at you, MissingNo). Luigi in SM64, all sorts of secret Smash 64 characters, literally the entirety of Pokemon.
I wonder if Luigi in SM64 and other games was also a product of memory constraints as some of these games did omit him for that reason specifically and thus presumably had initially been intended to include him before the memory issues came up. If that’s true he may have shown up in very early marketing material and spawned the legends.
On another kid’s hand: “Circle, circle, dot, dot. Now you have your cooties shot.”
That is not sufficient cootie protection. A properly trained physician will follow it up with
Circle circle, square square,
Now you have it everywhereNo cootie insurance though
Hold B+Down to increase your chances of catching a pokemon.
Nah, adults do that too
Not necessarily my favorite nor something widespread, but it was always the legend/meme that my middle/high schools had a pool on the roof (it was a one story building lmfao)
I remember kids would try to sell each other a pass to get to the second floor of one of our one-story buildings; I wonder if the pool rumor started as a similar joke/scam
This might be local but “Deem!” as the sound of magical transformation. As an adult I think some child heard/read something like “I deem you Sir Galahad, Knight of the Round Table” and mixed it up with cartoon magic sounds, but in our neighborhood any kid with a good stick could wave it and say “Deem! You’re a horse!” or “Deem! You’re a frog!” and the other kid would act the part for awhile. You could even deem yourself, like “Deem! I’m a wizard!” Which is redundant now that I think of it.
My childhood was in Los Angeles in the early 1960s, so it’s possible the cartoon’s author had a similar background and Dwayne is a humorous twist on Deem.
IDK but the Brothers Chaps are from Georgia. I was just trying to be funny.
Well you succeeded, and now I have to go learn more about them and their work! (so I can’t possibly do any of my chores rn)
oh you’re welcome. Homestar Runner was a staple of the 2000s. The original site used to be all in Flash until adobe killed it, which they comment on here. There used to be a “disturbingly comprehensive” wiki, but it seems to have been buried by bot traffic. The domain is pingable but http requests time out.
Could it be an onomatopoeia of the ringing/shimmering sounds sometimes used? Like an alternate of “ding”?
Yes to that, but also I remember, if I was the fairy or the witch I might say “I’m gonna deem you a princess, okay?” Or even “what do you want me to deem you?” if I wasn’t feeling bossy.
I middle/high school the best sub was rumored to live out of the back of his station wagon and had cardboard boxes to extend the back of it for extra shelter. It didn’t help that the man embraced the rumor.
He once shared some pie with me when I was having a small breakdown in an empty room senior year due to my severe depression and from being bullied severely. He just offered me pie and we sat in silence and each ate a piece and then went on our way. It was nice.
Blowing in the Nintendo cartridge. Miss Mary Mack.
Blowing in it did work, it was just bad long term
Miss Mary Mack.
I hear she dressed in black with silver buttons down her back.
The girl arts. Double dutch, the hand games like Miss Mary Mack and Bisquick, stuff girls seemed to spontaneously do that boys had nothing to do with. It feels like, when I was 6, the girls around me were always teaching each other stuff like that, and then by the time I was 16 it had transformed into teaching each other the cha cha slide. Done well those hand clap games and such could be impressive to watch.
I have a child monitor that only charges if I blow in it before plugging it. It’s legit
You can make yourself wake up at 6am tomorrow by hitting yourself on the head 6 times, you need to do it really hard though.
the swedish word for “dibs” is “pax”. which, i only realized much later, is latin for “peace”. always thought that was neat.
It’s gotta be The Cool S.
So the cool s has no verified origin ans has occured in childlore functionally spontaneously across every demographic. It occurs in every nation with very little variation, regardless of language, and as far as symbols go, it’s remarkably complex to be appearing so consistently with 14 distinct lines.
For this reason, my silly theory is actually that it’s the yellow sign. The symbol of the eldrich elder god of manipupations of the cthulhu mythos, the king in yellow, Hastur. Thus, among his mind warping eldritch knowledge is the true secret to writing your full name in the cool S font.
Occam’s razor probably points to having access to graph paper in school and connecting corners.
Why an S?
That all has to do with Cthulu as S is widely known as his favorite letter.
You could somehow make a legal and illegal version of a ninja throwing star with popsicle sticks.
Okay, so back in the 1990s Charter Medical Corporation ran a suicide prevention hotline with the number 1-800-CHARTER. They ran a massive TV ad campaign with the tagline “If you don’t get help at Charter, please, get help somewhere.” These commercials ran on daytime TV so they were a little…oblique. Euphemistic. So that children wouldn’t understand them. So we didn’t.
Around that time, it was popular slang among teh youthz to say “you need help” as a way of calling someone stupid. You can hear one of Roger’s daughters say it in the first Lethal Weapon movie in response to his attempt at rapping.
And of course, people who “need help” should call Charter. So in the 1990’s there was a fad of us school kids calling each other stupid by saying “You need to call Charter.” And I wonder how local that was, I know at least two elementary schools in my county did that. American Millennials, do you remember this?
I remember this! Then we went on a field trip or something in what the teachers called a “charter bus” (as in a bus and driver you rent for an event) and it spawned some lame jokes probably from yours truly.
Step on a crack…
This band puts on legendary shows. I got to see Saxquatch open for them.
Wow they look like a lot of fun
I bought a record and half the band signed it after the show. There’s a lot of members so getting the whole band to sign it was a little difficult.
They are fun for the whole family. Their shows start with a drum line through the crowd. It’s a great way to get the audience pumped. Mid show they told everyone to bring it down and the whole crowd was suddenly half as tall. They’re a real class act.
