I've always been slightly preoccupied by the levels of unnecessary violence in nursery rhymes. Witness!
1)Fractured skulls "Jack and Jill"
2)Stolen lambs' tails "Little Bo Peep"
3)Umm..more tail butchery "Three Blind Mice"
4)Bird-nose assault "Sing a Song of Sixpence"
5)Death by gluttony "Old Woman who swallowed a fly"
6)Child cruelty "Old woman who live in a shoe"
7)Spontaneous combustion "Pop goes the weasel"
8)Plague Death March "Ring around the Rosies" Of course a lot of these old rhymes have hidden meanings that have lost their sense over the years.
For instance:
"Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king's horses and all the king's men, couldn't put Humpty together again." Which is widely accepted to refer to the destruction of a cannon during the English civil war. But here's the greater mystery, where's the line that explains, "oh, and Humpty's a giant, living egg?" It's not even as if the top of a wall is an especially likely place to find an egg. Or that one of the activities most closely associated with all the King's men is egg repair. So at what point did Humpty become an egg in the national psyche? And how? And had he not "had a great fall", what would he have hatched into?
And where did he procure his outlandishly large egg clothes?
And why would he want to dress like a human anyway? To win us over?
To blend in amongst us for some sinister purpose? I'm quite glad he fell.... Eggy menace.
1)Fractured skulls "Jack and Jill"
2)Stolen lambs' tails "Little Bo Peep"
3)Umm..more tail butchery "Three Blind Mice"
4)Bird-nose assault "Sing a Song of Sixpence"
5)Death by gluttony "Old Woman who swallowed a fly"
6)Child cruelty "Old woman who live in a shoe"
7)Spontaneous combustion "Pop goes the weasel"
8)Plague Death March "Ring around the Rosies" Of course a lot of these old rhymes have hidden meanings that have lost their sense over the years.
For instance:
"Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king's horses and all the king's men, couldn't put Humpty together again." Which is widely accepted to refer to the destruction of a cannon during the English civil war. But here's the greater mystery, where's the line that explains, "oh, and Humpty's a giant, living egg?" It's not even as if the top of a wall is an especially likely place to find an egg. Or that one of the activities most closely associated with all the King's men is egg repair. So at what point did Humpty become an egg in the national psyche? And how? And had he not "had a great fall", what would he have hatched into?
And where did he procure his outlandishly large egg clothes?
And why would he want to dress like a human anyway? To win us over?
To blend in amongst us for some sinister purpose? I'm quite glad he fell.... Eggy menace.
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