The Internet Archive offers a wealth of digital books and other publications for free checkout, including the 1948 collection of jokes, riddles, and playground sayings called A Rocket in My Pocket: The Rhymes and Chants of Young Americans. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Children’s Rhymes and Chants”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
Okay, I’m thinking of an animal.
It has a head like a cat, feet like a cat, a tail like a cat.
It’s a cat.
But it’s not a cat.
Oh.
It’s not a cat.
What is it?
A caterpillar?
I don’t know.
I don’t know what.
A kitten.
Oh!
Of course.
Oh, of course.
That’s from a book called A Rocket in My Pocket, The Rhymes and Chants of Young Americans.
It’s from 1948, and I found it on archive.org, which, as you know, is a great resource.
Tons of books that you can check out in digital format.
Yeah.
Thousands of them.
Yeah, it’s super cool.
I got another riddle or two for you, and they’re a lot harder.
I had real trouble with them.
Red and blue and delicate green, the king can’t catch it and neither can the queen.
Pull it in the room and you can catch it soon.
Answer this riddle by tomorrow at noon.
Wow.
Yeah.
Is that bees or the wind?
Your guesses are better than mine.
I couldn’t figure it out.
It’s a rainbow.
Oh, wow.
Catch it in a prism, right?
Catch it in a prism.
Or in the queen’s jewels or something like that.
Okay, nice.
Okay, that makes a lot of sense.
One more?
Yeah.
I washed my hands in water that never rained nor run.
I dried them with a towel that was never wove or spun.
A dew on a spider’s web.
Dew and sun.
Dew and sun?
Is it dew on a spider’s web?
Dew and sun?
Yeah, dew and sun.
I was thinking of the towel.
What was the towel?
The sun, drying it out.
The sun, okay, gotcha.
Got it half right.
Wow.
When I was a kid, I loved checking books of riddles out of the library.
I really did.
Oh, man.
I worked my way down the Dewey Decimal Shelf.
I don’t remember the number anymore, but I would just hit them all, one after the other.
This is how I encountered Shel Silverstein, which is still a favorite of mine, just working my way down the shelves until I hit something good.
Oh, cool.
Well, you can do that at archive.org.
And the book was called A Rocket in My Pocket, The Rhymes and Chants of Young Americans.
1940s.
How great.
If you’ve got rhymes or something that you remember from when you were a kid, from the playground or something you wrote in a yearbook, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or tell us about it on Twitter at wayword.
