Nursery rhymes

Stardate August 18, 2010

I spend alot of my time right now listening to or reciting nursery rhymes. In fact, considering my eldest is now 19 and I'm still at it, well let's just say I've spent some time thinking about this.

I do understand that some of them have history behind them, for example, Ring a ring a rosie is about the bubonic plague, but really some of them are just downright disturbing!

A few years ago poor old Noddy and his mates had to have their lives overhauled due to various issues relating to political correctness. Baa Baa Black Sheep became Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep- even though there's no such thing as a rainbow sheep. But what about these other songs and rhymes that are sung to babies and small children on a daily basis across the world?

What about poor old Humpty Dumpty? All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again...though I don't fully understand the role of a horse when performing microsurgery myself. So in short, Humpty fell off a wall and died.

Sing a Song of Sixpence, a pocket full of rye. Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. When the pie was opened the birds began to sing...What? They were alive when they were put into the pie? To get a decent crust on a pie it would need to be at about two hundred degrees for at least twenty minutes- not that i'm a cooking expert-but it would be fair to say that the pie- and the birds- would have been in the oven for a good while at a decent heat.

Jack and Jill went up the hill...Jack fell down and broke his crown. That would be his HEAD!!! Not his ankle, not his wrist, not a metacarpel, but his head. Nice one.

Poor old eency weency spider was subject to drowning every time it rained, because he either hit his head so hard the first time it affected his memory...or maybe spiders have the memory of a goldfish. And whilst on the topic of spiders, poor arachnophobic Little Miss Muffet has to put up with the pesky spider whenever she tries to eat her lunch.
Where are the RSPCA in all this? I'm actually surpised that PETA and its associated loonies haven't picked up on these.

Some of them it's not so much the cruely to animals, but the encouraging of not so good behaviour. Diddle, Diddle Dumpling my son John, went to bed with his stockings on. One shoe off, and one shoe on...sounds like old John's had a big night. How many of us have woken up in that predicament after a night out on the town?

What about the poor baby in the cradle in Rock a Bye Baby? Seriously who leaves their baby in a cradle in the top of a tree that's not stable? Anyone got the DOC's phone number? Oh and we might as well tell them about Georgie Porgie who kisses girls and makes them cry but runs away when the boys come out. There's something going on at home there.

And don't get me started on Hey Diddle Diddle. Whoever wrote that was taking some seriously good cold and flu tablets.

Is it any wonder some people are so mixed up?