Zeroach-a-roach a-rolla rock!

September 5, 2005 10:46 PM

Does anyone know anything about this cup-passing game? (that's a 12mb .avi)

I learned the game at summer camp in 1990. It's got gibberish lyrics ("entree, zeroach-a-roach a-rolla rock, poka a lina poke, a lina berry chook a chook a chook!") and I assume at some point it was a drinking game. Anyone recognize it? Can anyone tell me where it came from or what the lyrics mean? It's hard to google since the lyrics are gibberish and impossible to spell. Searches for "cup-passing game" revealed seemingly unrelated games.

posted by arielmeadow to sports, hobbies, & recreation (4 comments total)

It looks a lot like Hakosot, which has actual words in Hebrew, but Hakosot lacks the lift the cup overhead steps. (So I'm not answering your question, just giving you a referent that might help in searches.)
posted by Zed_Lopez at 11:24 PM on September 5, 2005

I've seen something like this once before. The closest thing I could find was this mangled French song combined with cup passing, Estray Bonajour. The "bonajour" is almost certainly "bonjour" (good day/hello), and the "estray" is probably a word like "entree" found at the beginning. There's almost nothing similar about the phonemes of your chant, though, and I couldn't make out for the life of me what a lot of the French might have been, except:

"entree" probably "entrez" (come in)

"tashee tah" probably same as "cheetah", but from what?

"escaroo" probably some sort of "est-ce que ..."

"kayvah" probably "qui va" or some such interrogative

"kehaygeezah" may be just "qu'est-ce que c'est" (what is it?)

"keziggy" might be a shorter version of that or not.

Anyway, I suspect the origins are indeed French, but I don't know much French children's songs beyond the alphabet and Happy Birthday ... but it may be a French drinking song, of which none were taught in school for some reason. Maybe some sort of "come in, sit down, have a drink, pass it on" song.

The nonsense lyrics may not match simply because of evolution over thousands of campfires, much as the modern "Pizza Hut" (or "Fast Food") song derives from A Ram Sam Sam, a standard which predates all the brand names now used.
posted by dhartung at 12:17 AM on September 6, 2005

We played a similiar version of this game in college. Our version involved the consumption of large amounts of alcohol though.
posted by bat at 2:30 AM on September 6, 2005

I also learned a similar game in college, although the chant was completely different. As bat says, it was a drinking game, and the passing of the cups goes faster and faster while selected words of the chant are progressively dropped out (a la "B-I-N-G-O"), and people who can't keep up have to drink.
posted by Faint of Butt at 3:35 AM on September 6, 2005