“There you go, puppy! Some great gooey globs of meat!” said the Lady of the House as she put a few scraps of beef fat in the dog’s bowl this morning. Like a lowbrow Proust, I was instantly transported back to the elementary school playgrounds of my youth, and I sang the opening lines:

Greasy, grimy gopher guts!
Little dirty birdie feet!

“Mutilated monkey meat!” she chimed in. (This is apparently a regional variation; the standard I was raised on said “mashed-up baby monkey meat.”)

“Aren’t you glad I use a spooooon” I concluded.

This got me thinking about other schoolyard standards which would require sensitivity training and counseling today, such as:

Fatty, fatty, two by four!
Can’t fit through the bathroom door!
So he did it on the floor!
Licked it up and asked for more!

Then there was the old classic, “Diarrhea,” which I won’t quote, both out of mercy for my readers, and also because I was never quite sure what the standard verses were. I think the most common version was baseball-themed — “sliding into first, and you feel something burst, diarrhea, *clap clap*” — oh, right, I said I wasn’t going to quote it. Whoops.

I asked some younger employees if they remembered these. A 33-year-old recalled singing them. A 21-year-old claimed to be aware of them, but, perhaps still protective of his permanent record, disavowed ever giving voice to them himself. He further surmised that his generation was the last to even encounter them in samizdat form. Human nature being what it is, I somehow doubt today’s kids are any less fascinated by gross taboos than we were, no matter how hard their commissars try to re-educate it out of them. Nonetheless, perhaps we, like lowbrow Irish monks, should assemble an actual songbook to preserve the lore while we wait out these social justice dark ages.