It's Cracker Jack, not Cracker Jacks

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"Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack, I don't care if I never get back"

"Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jacks, I don't care if I never get back"

The first rhymes, the second doesn't.

...More use of a brand name (I guess)! !! !!

Isnt it "buy me some peanuts, and some cracker jack..."?

But yeah. "Take me out to the ballgame" must be the oldest song to mention a brand name of a product (accidental "product placing"). Never thought about that before.

It's "Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack."

The name of the snack sold then (and still sold today) is "Cracker Jack."

Cracker Jack is a combination of nuts and caramelized popcorn.

Is this about the Mandela Effect?

There's only one "some". It's "buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_Me_O ... _Ball_Game

Also "I don't care I never get back" is a double negative, and therefor not proper grammar. It should be "I don't care if I *ever* get back". Well, it's better English, anyway.

Yes, I am a grammar Nazi. Live with it.

But then again, people get the lyrics to songs incorrect all the time.

The original song used "I don't care if I never get back". Yes, people probably these days often sing the song with the grammatically correct "I don't care if I ever get back".

It's a popular song; the writers didn't really care too much about grammar; they were writing for a vernacular audience, not English majors (though some connoisseurs were, indeed, English majors).

...I think there's a now pretty archaic piece of slang of something being " crackerjack " ( or " crackajack ") being like " Excellent! It's right-on! Spot on! Nifty! Spiffy! Keen-o! "! I think it's in fiction set in America of the late 19th/early 20th Century. I don't know whether it or the snack came first .

The slang term came first. It is said that the maker of the snack heard "crackerjack" being used, and named it after that usage.

Not true, and the difference is in "whether ever" versus "if/then never" (but with the "then" part missing). To wit:

"If I never get back, [then] I do not care." = "I don't care if I never get back." << lyrical artistic license
"Whether I ever get back, I do not care." = "I don't care whether I ever get back." << better form at the expense of 3/4 cadence flow

So, the actual problem is the "then" part appearing ahead of the "if" part, not that the statement contains cancelling negatives.

Last edited by leejosepho on 15 Nov 2017, 6:07 pm, edited 7 times in total.

Here in the UK, I think most folks my age or more would know the word "Crackerjack!" from the kids TV show we used to have with that name (don't bother looking for clips, it was awful!) Guess that would come from the word that ASS-P was talking about, though I never heard it spoken other than the TV show's catchphrase. I'd never heard of the snack before (sounds nice!), so I guess we don't get that over here or it has a local brand-name.

We always called them Cracker Jacks,not becuse of the song.I think it may be a dialect thing.if you go to the store,it's not Kroger,but Krogers.I see the same thing now with Aldi.Everyone calls it Aldis.
I loved Cracker Jacks,except for the one day I ate part of a box before realizing it had sugar ants in it.Broke me of never eating something till you veiw it.

I still see Cracker Jack at the grocery store, I haven't had it in a long time. I wonder if they still put prizes in the box?

I'd say that is a slightly different case, because I would interpret it as people saying "Aldi's" (the shop that belongs to Aldi) rather than "Aldis" (more than one Aldi shop.) But you could well be right that there's a regional shift in the way that the word is used, as the "Cracker Jacks" version spreads by people hearing it sung that way.

A closer example might be the US use of plural "Legos". In the UK, there is no plural word "Legos", we'd say "some Lego" - each individual part is called a "a [Lego] brick", never "a Lego" (BTW, the Lego company themselves say this is correct!) So whether or not "Cracker Jacks" could even be right depends on whether one individual tasty morsel can be called a singular "Cracker Jack". I have no idea if that is the common usage, or if it varies from place to place.

Also, I wonder if the plural "peanuts" maybe subliminally makes people more likely to make "cracker jack" plural. I don't know the tune of the song, but it could also be that going from "...jack, " to the following "I ..." (sounds odd without a very slight pause to separate the words) might be easier to sing with the "s" in there (slurring the words together then sounds more natural.)


The second is a form of 'imperfect rhyme' called 'assonance' (same vowel sound), whereas the first is a 'perfect rhyme'.