The game of hot potato is pretty simple. Players arrange themselves in a circle and toss a small, round object (a tennis ball, an orange, a beanbag etc.) to each other while music plays. If a player drops the “hot potato” he’s out. The player who is holding the “hot potato” when the music stops is out. The game continues until one player is left — that player is the winner.
small potatoes pl (plural only) (idiomatic) One or more persons or things of relatively little consequence, importance, or value. It is heard more in Britain than in America, where small potatoes, likening a poor crop to something of little worth or importance, dates from the early nineteenth century.
On June 15, 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle altered 12-year-old student William Figueroa's correct spelling of "potato" to "potatoe" at the Muñoz Rivera Elementary School spelling bee in Trenton, New Jersey. He was the subject of widespread ridicule for his error. In his defense, the singular spelling of potato doesn't contain the letter “E,” so it is somewhat understandable that people would get confused when the plural does. The correct plural spelling is potatoes.
Immortalized in the George and Ira Gershwin song "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" is the nitpicking of pronunciation differences:
“You like potato and I like potahto,
You like tomato and I like tomahto,
Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto!”
According to the Oxford English Dictionary and other sources, the English do pronounce tomato as tə-MAH-toh rather than tə-MAY-toh. But this doesn't seem to be the case when it comes to potato!