Each year in my school had 4 teams for games like rugby: A, B, C and D in descending order of competence. Because my year had slightly more pupils than normal, a fifth team was created, imaginatively called E. I had the good fortune to be a member of this team, which we proudly renamed the E Team Dropouts. We were comprised of the fattest, laziest and most asthmatic kids in the year, and spent most of the time sitting around on the grass watching the other teams exhaust themselves.

Ever Lasting Protection, against the lurgy, cooties, fleas, etcetera. Administered with an invisible can of flea spray over the affected area of the body. Must be accompanied by a hissing sound - otherwise your pressurised can obviously isn't working, and no protection will be afforded. Can also be used on chairs and desks which are suspected of having been sat at by anyone incontinent, smelly or simply unpopular.

Advice given to pupils complaining about sun in their eyes, by English teacher Mr Roddy Thompson. Half-plausible until you realise that 1) eagles don't stare at the sun and 2) you'd go blind.

A phrase reserved for popular kids; short for excellent. They possibly didn't realise what pretentious upper-class pricks this one word made them sound like.

Oft used phrase in Longman's Audio-Visual French course, and the only words of French that 50% of our class learned thanks to Mrs Talbot's habit of wearing tight white tops.

This was the rather arbitrary name given to new boy Edward Coyde, in year 5, for no reason other than the quickfire cruelty of Mark Birch. The name never caught on, and boy was reduced to tears, but as a happy upshot Mark and Edward quickly became friends. I read in the paper recently that Birch had died in a car crash, whilst being driven by... Edward Coyde, who survived.

Version of telling, or arrrrrrrr. The main group of people would shout “ee-a, ee-a” for around three minutes, circling the offender, whilst one person would go for the teacher. Presumably we were a fleet of police cars, something of a waste of resources for doing a smelly trump.

Quite simply the rudest phrase that can be uttered by a six year old Scottish child.

Apparently a toley is a willy, and hen's keech is chicken poo. No further translation is provided.

Just so that you know, a toley is in fact a jobbie, and not a willy as previously suggested.

Also the Scottish expression wee toley means turtle's head. So as long as you're in Scotland, you can say "Oh, so ye cannae sit fae yer wee toley?", without anyone replying what the fuck are you talking about?

A north eastern variation of arrrrrrrrrrrrr and ummmmmmmmmmm.

Ahem? I'm from the north east and we always said Owwwhhhrrrrr. Yes, spelled just like that.

One of the many synonyms for 'twat'. After a while, the regular insult exchange evolved into:

Kid A: You're an eef!
Kid B: Eef what?
Kids A+B (singing): Eef I was a rich man...

They would then continue to sing any of the rest of the words if they could a) remember them, and b} be bothered.

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.

The ruthless teasing of short-fused ginger kid David Tyers was a highly rewarding pastime due to his tendency to fly into apoplectic rages and lose the ability to think clearly. His insulting yet mystifying outbursts reaching their high water mark with the frothy-mouthed ejaculation, "You egg dribble!" Damned by his own mouth, this was adopted as the weapon of choice for inflicting further suffering on poor Tyers.

A group of boys rounding up a group of girls on a school trip. The girls sit on a table in the boys room, and the boys proceed to circle round the table rubbing their imaginary breasts, all the time repeating, again and again, "Eggie Eggie Sa Sa". After some time the girls would become quite scared and start running around, screaming. Teachers rarely interrupted this process, perhaps scared to dabble in that which they didn't understand.