AMONG THE NUMEROUS ASPECTS of the verbal ingenuity of children, namecalling or the use of derogatory epithets and nicknames is a form of oral expression recognized as being of interest to the folklorist. But as the Opies have observed, the language of children is the "least recorded and the least recordable" of any speech pattern in Western culture.2 If collecting and recording can be characterized in these terms, interpretation and analysis fare no better. The folklorist, and other social scientists as well, must become interested in a deeper study of this kind of lore and of its social and psychological ramifications, because only by viewing these elements as part of the whole tradition may we understand the ways in which this lore is created, functions, changes, and enters oral tradition. Whenever folklorists have commented on or interpreted name-calling by children-and this has been seldom-they have tended to emphasize what they believe to be the innocuous features of this traditional activity, which they say usually takes place in a good-natured, give-and-take context. Anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists, however, while recognizing that these elements may be inherent in some contexts, have probed the problem more deeply and have suggested that the motives for the use of derogatory epithets and names by children may have deeper roots than the folklorist has been aware and that the results may be harmful if not downright devastating to the victim's personality. This is a viewpoint that deserves to be examined. In this paper I intend to (I) show how folklorists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and others have viewed this material; (2) construct a broad system of categories into which all epithets may