Taken from wikipedia:
Some older versions of this rhyme had the word nigger instead of tiger:
Eeny, meena, mina, mo, Catch a nigger by the toe; If he hollers let him go, Eena, meena, mina, mo.[3] This version was similar to that reported as the most common version among American schoolchildren in 1888.[10] It was used in the chorus of Bert Fitzgibbon's 1906 song "Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Mo":
Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Mo, Catch a nigger by his toe, If he won't work then let him go; Skidum, skidee, skidoo. But when you get money, your little bride Will surely find out where you hide, So there's the door and when I count four, Then out goes you.[11]
It was also used by Rudyard Kipling in his "A Counting-Out Song", from Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides, published in 1935.[12] This may have helped popularise this version in the United Kingdom where it seems to have replaced all earlier versions until the late twentieth century.[3]
Iona and Peter Opie pointed out in The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes that the word "nigger" was common in American folk-lore, but unknown in any English traditional rhyme or proverb.[3] This, combined with evidence of various other versions of the rhyme in the British Isles pre-dating this version, would seem to suggest that it originated in North America, although the apparently American word 'holler' was first recorded in written form in England in the fourteenth century, whereas according to the Oxford English Dictionary the words 'Niger' or 'nigger' were first recorded in England in the sixteenth century with their current disparaging meaning. The 'olla' and 'toe' are found as nonsense words in some nineteenth century versions of the rhyme, and it could possibly be that the original 'Where do all the Frenchmen Go?' (probably originating during one of the periods of Anglo-French warfare) was later on replaced by the earlier version in the United States, using some of the nonsense words
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eeny,_meeny,_miny,_moe
I have several questions:
Are words like "Eeny" "Miny" "Skidum" and "Skidoo" complete nonsense for the sake of creating a memorable delivery? What is the purpose of their usage?
How did the eeny, meeny, miny, moe rhyme begin? Was it a quick rhyme to tell small children, not unlike old pirate songs (ex; sing a song of sixpence, etc.)?
When the rhyme states "If he won't work then let him go" ... " is this implying a slave should be murdered, if deemed unproductive? Released to hunt the slave? Is there historical significance here?
When the rhyme states "But when you get money, your little bride will surely find out where you hide," What is this in reference to?
Why would anyone ever catch another human being by the toe? Or is this also to create a silly rhyme?
In addition to the now better known substitution of 'tiger' for 'nigger' I can tell you as a small child I definitely heard both iterations which is fascinating to me because I'm only in my 20's - so I'm curious about how the split began. I'd also be curious to hear how common each iteration is and what the origin is?
I'd just like to say that nonsense syllables at the beginning of counting-out games isn't restricted to English, but actually fairly common in German and Norwegian. The most popular German ditty begins "Ene mene miste, es rappelt in der Kiste" -- the first three words are nonsense, but set a rhythm and conveniently rhyme with the next line ('there's commotion in the chest/box'). The same with the most popular Norwegian one, which begins "Elle melle, deg fortelle" ('elle melle, telling you') and ends "snipp, snapp, snute, du er ute" ('snip-snap snout, you are out') -- which, incidentally, is how you end fairy tales in Norwegian, only with 'the fairy tale' substituted for 'you'.
There's even some ditties in both German and Norwegian that are almost exclusively nonsense, interspersed with a couple of 'real' lines. One of the German ones begins with what is widely assumed to be a bastarization of the French numbers one through four ("ong dong dee kader" for "un, deux, trois, quatre"), which makes sense considering it's from a town near the French border. A Norwegian example is the second one on the wiki page for Norwegian counting-out games.
This is covered by David Rubin in his 1995 book Memory in Oral Traditions: the Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes, chapter 10 (pp. 227-56).
In the nonsense syllables "eenie meenie miney mo", the sound patterns are key to their emergence and longevity (and this also applies to the other examples people have cited here): rhyme, alliteration, and assonance are all strongly self-replicating, self-propagating elements in oral traditions. Note that a single vowel gets repeated five times in the phrase "eenie meenie miney mo", and the syllable "nee" appears three times. These poetic devices also extend into the middle two lines, which convey a sort of meaning, though there meaning is also an important self-replication device so there's more room for incidental variations: when the first and last lines change, the changes tend to be more systematic, e.g. "eena deena dina do".
Textual variations are abundant. Rubin reports 82 variants of the text in a catalog compiled in 1980, with 291 word-changes. He classifies the 291 word-changes as follows:
A higher percentage doesn't indicate more popular variations, but wider variation. For the word "tiger" (the second most variable element in the rhyme), he reports the following variants:
Again, number of instances doesn't indicate popularity, but number of variants known. It's pretty obvious that "n****r" is a more primary version of the text, with the other variants as replacements to make the text more socially acceptable. Rubin points out that "tiger" and "monkey" are especially good replacements because they alliterate with "toe" and "mo" respectively.
Some variants are regional: for example, the word "hollers" is routinely replaced by "squeals" in Great Britain (he may mean excluding N. Ireland, it's not clear) and New Zealand. Rubin reports a 1979-1980 survey of Duke undergraduates in which the number of variants known came out as follows:
So in that population the variant "eenie meenie miney mo" is practically obligatory, and "hollers" is very much the standard. In terms of the relative popularity of alternatives to "tiger", here were the number of undergraduates who reported each variant:
At pages 246-7 Rubin gets on to the history of the changes. Here's the incidence of "n****r" over time:
So "n****r" starts to get replaced around WWII, and the rate of replacement increased dramatically during the Civil Rights movement. This result is not very surprising, but it's nice to know for sure. At every stage in the history of the rhyme, Rubin notes,
Using a both a comparison across all versions published in the folklore literature and a detailed analysis of two samples of Eenie Meenie collected 90 years apart, there were no trend that violated the constraints of the two rhymes
in terms of their self-propagating phonetic characteristics. That is to say, however much the rhyme changes, the importance of rhyme, alliteration, and assonance remain constant. (For reference, the second rhyme Rubin refers to is "One potato, two potato".) So, he concludes,
By either estimate [of the number of generations of children], Eenie Meenie has been stable for almost 20 generations. Thus the multiple constrains shown to operate in recall appear to function over historical time.
Rubin doesn't discuss the origins of the rhyme, but I don't imagine he'd have much to add to the report in Wikipedia. In terms of the motivation for why such a rhyme exists: counting-out rhymes are, if not universal, at least a very widespread habit among children. "Eenie meenie" fits into a category of many such rhymes: just in English, some other examples are "One potato, two potato"; "Onery, twoery, tickery, teven"; "Acker, backer, soda cracker"; and as other posters have pointed out, there's no shortage of counting-out rhymes in other languages.