The variant 'eenie meenie minee mo, catch a nigger by the toe', taught to me by the school's only black kid, should not be used in front of parents. Or in Clark's, no matter how hard it is to decide which shoes you want.

Nigger was changed to tiger in a more sensitive age, despite the fact that if you grabbed a tiger's toe, it would probably cut your finger off with its claw.

Eenie meenie at our school was always a bit of a lost cause. I imagine an adult at some point tried to offer a reasonable-sounding substitution to the word 'nigger' but failed to come up with anything. This resulted in some confusion.
On the plus side, none of us used the word 'nigger'; on the minus side, no-one as far as I can remember could ever really complete the rhyme. Attempts were made to guess what the missing words might be, and this was the best we could come up with:
Eenie Meenie Miney Mo,
Catch a fish and let it go,
Eenie Meenie Miney Mo,
Eenie Meenie Miney Mo.
A good example, I think, of an oral tradition utterly failing to evolve. Or, more accurately, evolving into a form that has spazflippers instead of arms and legs. I think we'd have been glad for the suggestion of 'Tiger'.

I just found out what it's all about. "Catch a nigger by the toe" was a way of finding out whether the nigger you were confronted with was - in fact - not a nigger at all, but the devil.
The devil's cloven hooves, you see, would feel no pain at the squeezing of a toe. However, your nigger would squeal, and say "ooh, me toe!", whilst hopping on one foot.
So it's not racist at all, you see - because if the nigger isn't the devil, you let him go, with a cheery "sorry about the toe, old bean, but you can't be too careful with you niggers".

As I recall we said the naughty version but knowing it was naughty, shiftily flubbed the ‘nigger’ bit, thus:
Eenie Meenie Minee Moe,
Catch a nngh-nngh by his toe.
The odd thing was, we (or perhaps it was just me) never actually knew what the original offending word that had to be flubbed was. This led to additional cover-ups just in case other words in the rhyme were naughty also, hence:
If he hoo-hars, let him go.
By the time we'd finished self-editing, we sounded like a bunch of West Country Joeys.

My first introduction to racsim. Ah, happy days...

There was me, blithely chanting this in the playground when thuggish headmaster lolloped up and whisked me off to his little room for some light punishment.

Given I grew up in Norn Iron, there wasn\'t anyone ethnic within 100 miles, so I can\'t imagine who he thought I was going to offend, the gobshite.

At my school, "nigger" was replaced by "nicker". The general consensus was that this was a thief - someone who "nicks" things.

naturally at aged 6 we said tigger because he was cute stripy and furry and had never heard of a nigger...well i hadnt
i always thought itd be easier to catch a tigger by throwing my arms around is neck, but it didnt fit the rhyme

My mam always told me it was knicker. Like knickers. Quite why anybody might want to find a toe on a knicker (half a pair of knickers possibly?) is anybody's guess.

The newly-accepted version, or at least the version I was spoon-fed, was the catch-a-baby-by-its-toe version.

Because this isn't very entertaining and doesn't make much sense, we decided that it would be apt to alter the final lines, instead of this offending line, into "If it squeals, wipe its bum / with a piece of chewing gum."

This was considered the epitome of comedic genius at 8.

Consider also the myriad variations of "ip dip", the most mainstream version probably being:

Ip, dip, dog-shit,
Hairy bastard
Smelly git
That means you are going to be "it"

When 6 year old children start from here and get gradually more offensive, you know they're from Yorkshire.

Or London.

Or Liverpool. Or Newcastle. OR anywhere except Kent, I think...

Much better way of deciding who's "it" in tig:
Ip dip doo
Doggy did a poo
Cat did a wee-wee
Out goes you!

I was going to use this when some 10 year olds I was babysitting were arguing, but couldn't remember the clean version.

The version popular at our primary school went thus;

Ip, dip, dog shit
Dirty bugger, fucking git
These words are true
So out goes you.

Just goes to show: Cumbrian poetry didn't die out with Wordsworth.

Eenie meenie minee mo
catch a tiger by the toe
if it hollers let it go
eenie meenie minee mo

My mother said to pick the very best one and that is you Y-O-U

According to mon pere, the phrase was:

Eenie meenie miny mo
Catch a rigger by the toe

Wikipedia claims several usages for the word Rigger, one of them being a person who specialises in the movement of especially large or heavy objects. This makes the rhyme sound downright dangerous.

PERSON: Gasp! A rigger! I must grasp him by his toe for no apparent reason!
RIGGER: Aaagh! My toe!
Rigger drops exceptionally large and heavy object, object crushes friendly and innocent village.