Mastodawn

What is your favorite bit of childlore?

https://lemmy.world/post/44018358

What is your favorite bit of childlore? - Lemmy.World

Childlore is folklore passed directly between children, without the input of adults. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childlore [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childlore] Stuff I can think of off the top of my head are paper fortune tellers, summoning Bloody Mary/the candyman, the cool S, parody songs like “Jingle bells Batman Smells” and “Joy to the world, the teacher’s dead” etc. This stuff has intrigued me since, well since I was a kid. I always wondered where they came from. I never saw adults doing that stuff, so I figured another kid had to have come up with it.

barkybeak Mar 9

So many gaming ones.

When mortal kombat was released for consoles, the kids passed the “blood code” for the genesis

When mortal kombat 2 came out, their were so many myths about super fatalities and weird stuff about how street fighter was in it.

early_riser Mar 9

Man oh man I could probably have a whole thread just for video game urban legends from the late 90s. That’s when some of your friends had internet, but maybe you didn’t, so there was just enough legit info to make the fake stuff seem believable (looking at you, MissingNo). Luigi in SM64, all sorts of secret Smash 64 characters, literally the entirety of Pokemon.

CheeseNoodle Mar 9

I wonder if Luigi in SM64 and other games was also a product of memory constraints as some of these games did omit him for that reason specifically and thus presumably had initially been intended to include him before the memory issues came up. If that’s true he may have shown up in very early marketing material and spawned the legends.

wizardbeard Mar 9

presumably had initially been intended to include him

Fun fact: In one of the many leaks of Nintendo internal files in the past decade, early source code and the model was found for Luigi in SM64. His inclusion was abandoned very early on in development.

Blowing in the Nintendo cartridge. Miss Mary Mack.

Captain Aggravated Mar 10

Miss Mary Mack.

I hear she dressed in black with silver buttons down her back.

The girl arts. Double dutch, the hand games like Miss Mary Mack and Bisquick, stuff girls seemed to spontaneously do that boys had nothing to do with. It feels like, when I was 6, the girls around me were always teaching each other stuff like that, and then by the time I was 16 it had transformed into teaching each other the cha cha slide. Done well those hand clap games and such could be impressive to watch.

I have a child monitor that only charges if I blow in it before plugging it. It’s legit

Blowing in it did work, it was just bad long term

Step on a crack…

Widdershins Mar 9

Beak your mummy’s back

This band puts on legendary shows. I got to see Saxquatch open for them.

Here Come The Mummies - Do You Believe

YouTube

venusaur Mar 10

Wow they look like a lot of fun

Widdershins Mar 10

I bought a record and half the band signed it after the show. There’s a lot of members so getting the whole band to sign it was a little difficult.

They are fun for the whole family. Their shows start with a drum line through the crowd. It’s a great way to get the audience pumped. Mid show they told everyone to bring it down and the whole crowd was suddenly half as tall. They’re a real class act.

It’s gotta be The Cool S.

Postmortal_Pop Mar 9

So the cool s has no verified origin ans has occured in childlore functionally spontaneously across every demographic. It occurs in every nation with very little variation, regardless of language, and as far as symbols go, it’s remarkably complex to be appearing so consistently with 14 distinct lines.

For this reason, my silly theory is actually that it’s the yellow sign. The symbol of the eldrich elder god of manipupations of the cthulhu mythos, the king in yellow, Hastur. Thus, among his mind warping eldritch knowledge is the true secret to writing your full name in the cool S font.

ToffeeIsForClosers Mar 9

On another kid’s hand: “Circle, circle, dot, dot. Now you have your cooties shot.”

early_riser Mar 9

No cootie insurance though

That is not sufficient cootie protection. A properly trained physician will follow it up with

Circle circle, square Square
Now you have it everywhere

Mouselemming Mar 9

This might be local but “Deem!” as the sound of magical transformation. As an adult I think some child heard/read something like “I deem you Sir Galahad, Knight of the Round Table” and mixed it up with cartoon magic sounds, but in our neighborhood any kid with a good stick could wave it and say “Deem! You’re a horse!” or “Deem! You’re a frog!” and the other kid would act the part for awhile. You could even deem yourself, like “Deem! I’m a wizard!” Which is redundant now that I think of it.

XeroxCool Mar 9

Could it be an onomatopoeia of the ringing/shimmering sounds sometimes used? Like an alternate of “ding”?

Mouselemming Mar 11

Yes but also I remember, if I was the fairy or the witch I might say “I’m gonna deem you a princess, okay?” Or even “what do you want me to deem you?” if I wasn’t feeling bossy.

early_riser Mar 19

Are you sure it wasn’t “dwayne”?

sbemail 192 - Shapeshifter

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

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Mouselemming Mar 19

My childhood was in Los Angeles in the early 1960s, so it’s very possible the cartoon’s author had the same background and Dwayne is a humorous twist on Deem.

early_riser Mar 19

IDK but the Brothers Chaps are from Georgia. I was just trying to be funny.

Mouselemming Mar 19

Well you succeeded, and now I have to go learn more about them and their work! (so I can’t possibly do any of my chores rn)

early_riser Mar 19

oh you’re welcome. Homestar Runner was a staple of the 2000s. The original site used to be all in Flash until adobe killed it, which they comment on here. There used to be a “disturbingly comprehensive” wiki, but it seems to have been buried by bot traffic. The domain is pingable but http requests time out.

Everybody! Everybody!

Homestar Runner

In my elementary school there was a rumour that kissing someone on the mouth makes a baby in the throat. I’ve heard it still being spread years later. There are also parodies of famous German poems that you have or had to memorize in school, although I some kids learnt them from their parents. I know parody versions of Die Glocke and Die Bürgschaft.

hungryphrog Mar 9

Soo… Does that mean you’re gonna give birth by coughing or vomiting up the baby?

I don’t think the kids thought that far. I certainly didn’t.

the swedish word for “dibs” is “pax”. which, i only realized much later, is latin for “peace”. always thought that was neat.

You can make yourself wake up at 6am tomorrow by hitting yourself on the head 6 times, you need to do it really hard though.

CerebralHawks Mar 9

Going way way back to the 1980s… there was a rumour around my school that there was a secret chocolate factory hidden in Super Mario Bros 1. We didn’t really think there would be much to it, but we’d all been to the minus world and we saw the palette swap in some worlds (like I think world 6). The more reasonable or computer/code minded of us just figured it was a glitch that palette swapped everything to browns, so “chocolate factory” became the name for it, where it didn’t officially have one.

Nintendo must have heard this rumour, because Super Mario World featured a “Chocolate Island.” But this was before SMB2 was ever a thing.

early_riser Mar 9

I’ve heard of this (way after the fact). IIRC it was part of some player’s guide, and may have been included either as a joke by the author or a copyright trap by the publisher.

CerebralHawks Mar 11

Wow, I never heard it was written down anywhere. I never bought unofficial guides, either, though I did subscribe (rather, my parents subscribed me to) Nintendo Power. Not sure if they wrote it in an article in a magazine, or if I just heard it on the playground.

Either way, that’s pretty common with maps. Map makers will invent towns that do not exist, and if they see other map makers using it, they know their work was stolen.

GlenRambo Mar 9

You could somehow make a legal and illegal version of a ninja throwing star with popsicle sticks.

XeroxCool Mar 9

These video game ones now have me wondering if anyone else was told they could unlock extra characters in Super Smash Bros (N64) by clicking certain names in the credits.

We had various rules about how to do a “snow dance”. Something about wearing pajamas and walking around a pillow to get school canceled.

early_riser Mar 9

These video game ones now have me wondering if anyone else was told they could unlock extra characters in Super Smash Bros (N64) by clicking certain names in the credits.

The methods for unlocking these supposed secret characters were always ridiculously convoluted, so if it didn’t work you were probably doing it wrong. Like beating the game 10 times on level 9 difficulty with 1 stock with Pikachu would unlock Mewtwo, etc.

But like I said above, the stuff that was legit was often so weird and seemingly arbitrary that the fake stuff sounded more plausible. Talk to a specific NPC, fly to a specific area and surf up and down a specific coast, and you’ll encounter a glitched pokemon that will duplicate the sixth item in your inventory. Yeah it was all about memory registers or whatever, but I didn’t know about that stuff at the time.

GalacticSushi Mar 9

The rumor that existed in every single school that Marilyn Manson had a rib removed so he could suck his own penis

MIDItheKID Mar 10

That rumor came up in his autobiography and he wrote -

“If I really got my ribs removed, I would have been busy sucking my own dick on The Wonder Years instead of chasing Winnie Cooper. Plus, who really has time to be killing puppies when you can be sucking your own dick? I think I’m gonna call the surgeon in the morning.”

Side note: Marilyn Manson is a peice of shit.

Quadhammer Mar 10

He… he was on the wonder years?

rosco385 Mar 10

No, but there was a rumour back in the day the he was the kid who played Kevin’s best friend.

Nibodhika Mar 10

I’m out of the loop on that one, why is he a piece of shit?

GreenKnight23 Mar 10

he basically raped and tortured Evan Rachel Wood.

Geobloke Mar 10

A bunch of women accused him of sexual violence, but nothing is showing up on his wiki.

He also seems to have been a bit of a dick to bandmates

For my generation this was about Prince

LaunchesKayaks Mar 10

I middle/high school the best sub was rumored to live out of the back of his station wagon and had cardboard boxes to extend the back of it for extra shelter. It didn’t help that the man embraced the rumor.

He once shared some pie with me when I was having a small breakdown in an empty room senior year due to my severe depression and from being bullied severely. He just offered me pie and we sat in silence and each ate a piece and then went on our way. It was nice.

jivandabeast Mar 10

Not necessarily my favorite nor something widespread, but it was always the legend that my middle/high schools had a pool on the roof (it was a one story building lmfao)

I remember kids would try to sell each other a pass to get to the second floor of one of our one-story buildings; I wonder if the pool rumor started as a similar joke/scam

MIDItheKID Mar 10

You heard about that guy that took too much acid and couldn’t sit down because he thought he was a glass of orange juice and he would spill?

without the input of adults

All these “thought himself an orange and peeled himself” drug shit are bs propaganda that adults have come up with.

LORDSMEGMA Mar 10

Ours was a kid on a band trip to Disneyland. Wouldn’t get off the teacups be wise he didn’t want to spill

Hold B+Down to increase your chances of catching a pokemon.

Nah, adults do that too

Captain Aggravated Mar 10

Okay, so back in the 1990s Charter Medical Corporation ran a suicide prevention hotline with the number 1-800-CHARTER. They ran a massive TV ad campaign with the tagline “If you don’t get help at Charter, please, get help somewhere.” These commercials ran on daytime TV so they were a little…oblique. Euphemistic. So that children wouldn’t understand them. So we didn’t.

Around that time, it was popular slang among teh youthz to say “you need help” as a way of calling someone stupid. You can hear one of Roger’s daughters say it in the first Lethal Weapon movie in response to his attempt at rapping.

And of course, people who “need help” should call Charter. So in the 1990’s there was a fad of us school kids calling each other stupid by saying “You need to call Charter.” And I wonder how local that was, I know at least two elementary schools in my county did that. American Millennials, do you remember this?

early_riser Mar 19

I remember this! Then we went on a field trip or something in what the teachers called a “charter bus” (as in a bus and driver you rent for an event) and it spawned some lame jokes probably from yours truly.

KuromiGirl04 Mar 10

The version of the Little Einsteins theme song i would sing in middle school and high-school everytime we went on a field trip on a school bus

We’re going on a trip, in our favorite piece of shit! Doin’ 95, we’ll probably fucking die!

The teachers hated it but a bunch of the other kids thought it was funny and would sing along

Hold your breath when you pass the graveyard, or go through a tunnel.

Lift your feet off the ground when a vehicle you’re in goes under the train tracks.

If you sharpen a pencil really sharp, you can stick it into a ceiling tile and it will stay there.

Chew up some paper and you can spit it at someone through a straw as a spitball.

How to fold a paper fortune teller, and play it. For some reason my classmates labeled it with the different kinds of sex acts we had heard of but didn’t really understand. (Kissing, sex, 69, blowjob…)

How to play MASH.

How to play tag.