unwritten lore

When I was in the first, second, and third grades, I learned a variety of songs, poems, conventional wisdom, and jokes on the playground at recess.

Many of these strange pieces of oral history involved either a topic that couldn't be discussed with adults or the use of words that we were not generally allowed to pronounce out loud.

I always assumed that these elementary school discussions were particular to my school in my town. Imagine my surprise years later when I discovered that children in cities far from my hometown had learned the identical songs and jokes!

It was one of those late nights in the girls dorm at a university when somehow we began sharing the silly elementary school no-no's that we had repeated so deliciously when we were six or seven or eight years old. It was amazing to discover that regardless of which part of the U.S. the elementary school was located in, the same naughty poems were being recited.

At that time, young children did not have cell phones and internet connections. How did that unwritten lore travel across the nation with such accuracy? We know from the gossip game that a secret passed around rarely ends up as it began.

Certainly, the cadence and rhyming helped cement the consistency of the songs and poems. Perhaps it was the forbidden nature of the jokes that caused them to be repeated with such unerring accuracy.

I wonder if the communication principles of that very effective childish network are duplicated among adults. Maybe "old wives tales" are a similar form of communication outside standard communications channels. Maybe today's urban legends are a similar phenomenon.