Why do the children's book on the nursery rhyme depict Humpty Dumpty as egg shaped, when the rhyme makes no attempt on describing Humpty dumpty whatsoever ?
@Mamapolo2016 Sounds so plausible. Lots of old nursery rhymes, like "Ring-o-Ring-o-Rosie", date back to the Middle Ages. Maybe it was a way to make things less scary for kids. But if they seem like nonsense rhymes, do young kids really care?
Dunno but I want to know why the king sent his horses and men to fix Humpty Dumpty.Horses are not trained in surgical procedures.I'm not aware of any horses that can even scrub up.
@Virgo79 If ever there was anything designed to smash an egg it is a horses hoof.The King will be in deep trouble if anyone invades but his horses and men cannot protect him because they are too busy trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together.
SW-User
Humpty Dumpty is King Richard III of England, depicted as humpbacked in Tudor histories and particularly in Shakespeare's play, and who was defeated, despite his armies, at Bosworth Field in 1485. He had severe scoliosis, and not a hump.
@Really Whatever its origins, it has nothing to do with bombs. The second line (the last one of the whole poem) shows it is far too old for that. I don't know when beheading was abolished in England, but I think it was well before the middle of the 18C.
@ArishMellGoodness, my tongue in cheek reference to bombs was about the times & conditions in which my parents bought those records - sorry if you missed that. (We didn't call them discs, much less disks 😊)
The rhyme itself is "traditional" - i.e. old enough for its age to be uncertain. It's about the sounds of various Old London (England) church bells. The context of the last lines is controversial but may refer to the Tower of London where heads had been routinely chopped off.
Well when jack and jill went up the hill to fetch a pale of water. What were they really drinking that made made them fall down hard enough to break jacks crown?
@Adrift Reminds me of a series of random French words to be read out at a party by some unsuspecting victim so that they'd seem to be reciting Jack & Jill with a speech defect. It began with "Chacun Gilles" for J&J and ended with 'au voiture" for "of water".
Well, now what I’m about to say, I heard though I wasn’t present; and that is that…”all the kings horses and all the king’s men just simply rode by”…bad case of apathy!
That's the name I've always known it by; I don't know how and where it originated, nor why the name; but I learnt it first in Primary School, a long way from London and about 63 years ago!
Sometimes the original message would survive barely past the first two or three people.
The name "Chinese Whispers" in fact is now in the language as a common cause for communications failures generally, where a message needs relaying through several departments .
There is an aprocryphal story from World War One, that a British army unit's request to "Send more ammunition. We're going to advance" went through so many relays it arrived at HQ as something like "Send two-and-six*, we're going to a dance".
Much more recently, is a piece of industrial folk-humour based on this. By folk-humour I mean anonymous satirical drawings or writings lampooning various aspects of work, especially managers, from unknown sources, but spreading through the country's industrial-estates and office-blocks at a great rate of knots. In this case the rightly damning shop-floor criticism of some inept new Directorial invention or policy, becomes slowly translated, word by word, on its upward progress to the board-room, from "It's a load of s**t", to "It's pure gold!"
Rock a bye baby, on the tree top, When the wind blows the cradle will rock. When the bough breaks the cradle will fall, And down will come baby, cradle and all.
Not exactly comforting words, but presumably the baby is too young to understand the meaning. It could be that toddler rhymes are the same: toddlers are too young to understand them the way adults might.
