Tootsie Toys made the car, tootsie is another term for toes, I started looking at nursery rhymes relating to toes..

Chinese whispers: a childhood memory, or how language transformed across four generations.

“Snip snap snorum
Hey coca dorum”

A half-remembered nursery rhyme, from when my grandmother cut my toenails as a small child. Having only ever heard it, who knew how it was spelled? But my recollection only covers two toes at the most: it takes at least three snips to cut off one nail. So there must be more. I call my dad.

“Snip snap snorum
Hey coco lorum”

He says. It was “coco” not “coca”, and “lorum” not “dorum”. Not that this means much to me. It’s Latin I’m sure, which is all very well when you’re a posh boy from Cambridge in the 1950s, or an even posher girl, home-schooled in the 1920s, but I went to a state school in 1980s Canada.

Latin words aside, he can’t remember any more either. He suggests she might have learnt it from one of her nannys (great, they were born in the eighteen hundreds, this is really going to be easy).

While I’m on the phone to my dad (who is now suggesting I phone my aunt - this could be a slippery slope), I decide to look what I have, up on the old interweb.

Wikipedia has an article on a matching-type card game for children that originated in the 18th century, called “Snip Snap Snorem”. Though relevant, at first this seems like a red herring. This isn’t going to lead me to the rest of my nursery rhyme.

Scrolling down there is a description of another version of the game called “Jig”. What distinguishes this game from the others are the calls that are required from participants. The first player announces “Snip” as they play their first card, then those who follow do so calling “Snap”, “Snorem”, and “Hicockalorum”.

Hicockalorum! What?!

SO my hypothesis is this:

My grandmother was not chanting a nursery rhyme to me whilst cutting my toenails all those years back. Through osmosis from one of her nannys she had absorbed this as a chant, and was now flippantly throwing the rules to an 18th century children’s card game my way, so that a quarter of a century later, I would be scuppered in my plans to write a quaint little entry for Object Retrieval about nursery rhymes.

Note: The final line of this “nursery rhyme”, which has mutated and transformed itself so many times already, turns out not even to have been “hicockalorum” at all, but “high cockolorum”. Something tells me there is more to explore here, more on that later.

References:
Interview with Ben Armstrong, 18 October 2009.
Wikipedia article “Snip Snap Snorem”.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, 1910.
Notes and Queries, 1862.