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Looks like he was just picking up dinner...guess that camera hadn't been used for a while...

Incy wincy

Is "incy wincy" Britishese for "itsy bitsy"?

This is how I learned it:

The incey wincey spider
Climbed up the water spout
Down came the rain
And washed the spider out
Out came the sun
And dried up all the rain
And the incey wincey spider
Climbed up the spout again.

I learned it as itsy bitsy.

I'm sure Meade can enlighten us as to the "correct" version.

Guinevere wrote:I'm sure Meade can enlighten us as to the "correct" version.

Undoubtedly...

I learned it as "itsy bitsy." My kids learned it as "La arana pequenita."

I learned it as "eensie-weensie"...though that may be the way Brits pronounce "incy wincy".

Google:
550,000 results for incy wincy
509,000 results for itsy bitsy

A clear winner then (even if Wiki seems to endorse California as the earliest printed location of the song)

Google:
550,000 results for incy wincy
509,000 results for itsy bitsy

Nice try using a rubatoesque tactic to produce misleading results that favor your argument, but the issue is "itsy bitsy spider " versus "incy wincy spider"...

Using the genuinely relevant phrases at issue, the Google search results are:

incy wincy spider: About 375,000 results

itsy bitsy spider: About 740,000 results

Yes, there is indeed a "clear winner", by nearly two to one, and it isn't the Britishese version...

I prefer Boris the Spider.

btw - Boris is British.

It's incy wincy.

I'm not sure which way I first learned it as a kid growing up in Massachusetts - we certainly used the phrase 'incy wincy' in our house, which makes sense given my mother's English heritage.

However, in my mind whatever way I learned it as a kid has been entirely overcome by Carly Simon's 'Itsy Bitsy Spider' from the Heartburn soundtrack:

Lord Jim wrote:
Using the genuinely relevant phrases at issue, the Google search results are:

incy wincy spider: About 375,000 results
itsy bitsy spider: About 740,000 results

Duh, I used the three relevant words in both cases, Watson duh! ["incy wincy" alone without spider is 792K and itsy bitsy alone is 1.65 million]

But I bet you used the sly and even more underhanded rubesque tactic of NOT putting quotes around the phrase so you got all the sites that had itsy and bitsy and spider in them as well as with the exact phrase. And I bet you typed incy wincy's pider. (1 result on a South African Babygrow website but they corrected your misplaced ')

Let me make this clear:

"incy wincy spider" = 547,000 exact phrase
"itsy bitsy spider" = 420,000 exact phrase

I have no idea why my first result for itsy bitsy was so over-stated.... the winner is even clearer than I posted

Joe Guy wrote:I prefer Boris the Spider.

btw - Boris is British.

John Entwistle wrote the song, Boris the Spider.

Boris the spider?

I don't know what Google search you're using Gen'l, but when I use "itsy bitsy spider" and "incy wincy spider" , including the quotation marks, I get:

"itsy bitsy spider": About 528,000 results

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22itsy ... channel=sb

"incy wincy spider": About 370,000 results

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22incy ... channel=sb

A clear clock cleaning victory for the American over the Britishese version...

Must be your eyes LJ. I used your links:

358K for itsy bitsy
551K for incy wincy We need someone else here to click your URLs and see what their results are... volunteer(s)?

Plus you can hear the real version on Wallander, Series 3, Episode 7 "An Event in Autumn" and that pretty much decides it right there.

My links (which gave same results as yours as I typed above):
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=%2 ... +spider%22
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=%2 ... +spider%22

Why do my URLs look different to yours (and yet get the same result ha ha )

I wonder why I never get the same result twice in a row? I've had 550, 547 and now 551 for incy wincy for example.

I click your links, and I get the same results I get with mine, Gen'l....

Maybe Google is humoring you...