Little Piggy Rhyme Variations

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Greetings. Hi, Chris Carlile here.

Greetings, Chris. How are you doing?

I’m doing wonderful. I’m Chris Carlile from Sebastian, Florida.

And I listened to your show and I’ve had this question I’ve wanted to ask you for quite some time.

All right, let it out. What is it?

All right. When you have little children, sometimes you count their toes and you go, this little piggy went to market. This little piggy stayed home.

In my family, it was this little piggy had corned beef and cabbage. This little piggy had none. Wee, wee, wee all the way home.

Well, we had children. I did this one day in front of my wife, and she’s going, what in the world are you talking about? It’s not corned beef and cabbage. It’s roast beef. You’re out of your mind. You’re English. That’s an English problem. It’s corned beef and cabbage for sure.

Well, over the years, I asked a number of people, patients I’ll be working with or people I’d meet in a casual situation. I said, oh, by the way, on the three little piggies, I mean the little piggies thing, how do you do it? And invariably, everybody said roast beef.

So I was totally devastated. And what I want to find out is, is this something that is unique to my family or to my Irish-Italian heritage, or are we isolated and my family is doing this in an oddball way?

Is your wife English-English or English-Heritage?

Well, she’s not English-English. She’s English and Swedish and some other varieties, too. And I’m more of an Irish-Italian background.

Okay, and does the Italian side of your family say corned beef and cabbage or whatever the equivalent is in Italian?

I don’t know. I really don’t know. I just know from my mother, and she’s more leaning towards the Irish side.

Well, seriously, I don’t know of anybody else who says corned beef and cabbage, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen.

No, over the history of the hundreds of years that variants of the three little piggies rhyme has been around. And by the way, it wasn’t always done on the toes. People do things like bread and jam. What are the other ones, Martha?

Let’s see. Jam and bread, bread and butter, roast beef, clam chowder.

Clam chowder comes up, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, it’s one of those things you can riff on and throw in all different kinds of foods.

But I’m sure that if we have a listener out there who has used corned beef and cabbage in this, we’ll hear about it.

So this little piggy went to market. This little piggy stayed home. This little piggy had corned beef and cabbage. This little piggy had none. That’s your rhyme.

Doesn’t that just roll? I mean, just roll. Nice, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And corned beef is kind of hard to beat for a good meal, so that’s a plus, too.

Well, let’s put the word out formally lighting up the do-you-know-this bright, shiny spotlights that are flashing across the horizon.

Yeah, don’t leave Chris hanging here. This sounds like it really gets to you.

Yeah. No, I think it’s just kind of a curiosity. I wanted to share it with you folks.

Yeah, sure. Thanks. Really appreciate it. And we’ll find out if somebody else says corned beef, and I’m sure we’ll hear about their other variants as well.

Well, thank you so much, and I love your show.

Thanks, Chris. Bye-bye.

Thanks, Chris. Bye-bye. Have a great day. Bye-bye.

Call us if you’ve got a variation on this, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email to words@waywordradio.org.

And if you’ve got theories about why adults like to eat baby toes, we’d like to hear those too.