A Culture Transmitted Sideways, Never Downwards

Games, rhymes and rules pass between young people directly, with adults almost entirely outside the chain.

There exists a body of material that is possessed almost exclusively by the young: counting rhymes for choosing who goes first, chants attached to particular games, elaborate rules for activities that no adult has heard of, formulas for settling disputes, insults with fixed structures, superstitions with precise conditions. It is a genuine culture, with vocabulary, conventions and internal standards of correctness. What makes it remarkable is not its content but its route. It does not descend from adults. It passes sideways and slightly downwards, from older members of the group to younger ones, and the adults in the vicinity are not participants in the transmission at all.

This produces an odd situation. Adults were once carriers of this material themselves and can often recall fragments of it, sometimes with startling completeness, decades later. Yet they did not pass it on. Their own contribution to the chain ended when they left the group, and the material continued without them, carried by successive cohorts who had no idea that anyone above them had ever known it. The culture therefore has continuity without ancestry in the usual sense. It is inherited from people only a few years older, who inherited it the same way, in a chain of very short links.

Because the chain is short and the carriers are constantly leaving, one would expect the material to degrade quickly. It does not. Variants persist, recognisable across long stretches of time and considerable distance, altering at the edges while keeping their structure. The mechanism is presumably repetition under conditions of high use: this material is not recited on special occasions, it is used constantly, in the ordinary business of organising a game, and constant use is a powerful preservative. It survives, in short, because it is needed, and it is needed because the young have to organise themselves and have been given nothing else with which to do it.