At the latest Mudcat singaround, a participant said she had an ancestor named Katzenellenbogen, so the name apparently got around in the olden days.

I wonder if the word refers to a particularly sharp bend in a stream course.

I've always thought the humor of the song came from Americans imitating the gentle rattling of German multisyllabic words, although "Gilly gilly" doesn't seem German at all. There's a y in the German alphabet, but the letter is hardly ever used. "Ossenpfeffer" surely comes from "Hasenpfeffer," (rabbit-pepper), a fairly well-known dish.

I like it that the song became a hit a mere nine years after Germans and Americans were fighting to the death is WW II. Perhaps it's a factor that there are a lot of Americans with German ancestry. (I just read somewhere that the most common type of surname is German.)

I wish I had some young kids around so we could sing it.