Moral Rhymes
Iona Opie died recently, aged Over a lifetime, she and her husband, Peter, produced detailed studies of nursery rhymes. It all started because a ladybird landed on her in a field in Where did they come from? What did they mean?
They applied scholarship to a topic — the seemingly nonsensical rhymes of ordinary people — that had previously been considered too lowbrow to warrant attention. Get The International Pack for free for your first 30 days for unlimited Smartphone and Tablet access.
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Please update your billing details here. Please update your billing information. Humpty-dumpty, reader, is the Dutch or something else for an egg". A manuscript addition to a copy of Mother Goose 's Melody published in has the modern version with a different last line: Humpty Dumpty sate [ sic ] on a wall, Humpti Dumpti [ sic ] had a great fall; Threescore men and threescore more, Cannot place Humpty dumpty as he was before.
In , James Orchard Halliwell published a collected version as:. Humpty Dumpty lay in a beck. With all his sinews around his neck; Forty Doctors and forty wrights Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty to rights! According to the Oxford English Dictionary , in the 17th century the term "humpty dumpty" referred to a drink of brandy boiled with ale. The rhyme is no longer posed as a riddle, since the answer is now so well known. Similar riddles have been recorded by folklorists in other languages, such as "Boule Boule" in French, "Lille Trille" in Swedish and Norwegian , and "Runtzelken-Puntzelken" or "Humpelken-Pumpelken" in different parts of Germany—although none is as widely known as Humpty Dumpty is in English.
The rhyme does not explicitly state that the subject is an egg, possibly because it may have been originally posed as a riddle.
Which word rhymes with moral?
Punch in suggested jocularly that the rhyme was a metaphor for the downfall of Cardinal Wolsey ; just as Wolsey was not buried in his intended tomb, so Humpty Dumpty was not buried in his shell. Professor David Daube suggested in The Oxford Magazine of 16 February that Humpty Dumpty was a "tortoise" siege engine , an armoured frame, used unsuccessfully to approach the walls of the Parliamentary held city of Gloucester in during the Siege of Gloucester in the English Civil War. This was on the basis of a contemporary account of the attack, but without evidence that the rhyme was connected.
From , the website of the Colchester tourist board attributed the origin of the rhyme to a cannon recorded as used from the church of St Mary-at-the-Wall by the Royalist defenders in the siege of The story given was that a large cannon, which the website claimed was colloquially called Humpty Dumpty, was strategically placed on the wall. A shot from a Parliamentary cannon succeeded in damaging the wall beneath Humpty Dumpty which caused the cannon to tumble to the ground.
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The Royalists or Cavaliers, "all the King's men" attempted to raise Humpty Dumpty on to another part of the wall, but the cannon was so heavy that "All the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't put Humpty together again". The Secret Meanings of Nursery Rhymes that there were two other verses supporting this claim. It has been pointed out that the two additional verses are not in the style of the seventeenth century or of the existing rhyme, and that they do not fit with the earliest printed versions of the rhyme, which do not mention horses and men.
Alice 's remark that he is "exactly like an egg" he finds "very provoking"; Alice clarifies that she said he looks like an egg, not that he is one. They discuss semantics and pragmatics: Humpty Dumpty says, "my name means the shape I am"; and later: Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you! Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. That's what I say! This passage was used in Britain by Lord Atkin in his dissenting judgement in the seminal case Liversidge v.
Anderson , where he protested about the distortion of a statute by the majority of the House of Lords. Hill and Zschernig v. It has been suggested by A.
- Little Bo Peep.
- What rhymes with moral?.
- Rhymes with Morals.
Larner that Carroll's Humpty Dumpty had prosopagnosia on the basis of his description of his finding faces hard to recognise. It's always the same.
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Now if you had the two eyes on the same side of the nose, for instance—or the mouth at the top—that would be some help. Humpty Dumpty has become a highly popular nursery rhyme character. American actor George L. Fox —77 helped to popularise the character in nineteenth-century stage productions of pantomime versions, music, and rhyme. Frank Baum 's Mother Goose in Prose , where the rhyming riddle is devised by the daughter of the king, having witnessed Humpty's "death" and her father's soldiers' efforts to save him.
The rhyme has also been used as a reference in more serious literary works, including as a recurring motif of the Fall of Man in James Joyce 's novel Finnegans Wake. It won the Pulitzer Prize and was twice made into a film in and , the former winning the Academy Award for best motion picture. In the Dolly Parton song Starting Over Again , it's all the king's horses and all the king's men who can't put the divorced couple back together again.
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Humpty Dumpty sat up in bed, Eating yellow bananas. Where do you think he put the skins? Down his striped pyjamas! TurboTax , a U. The ad depicted Humpty Dumpty in a hospital using a smartphone application to ask whether he could claim a tax deduction for medical expenses.
Humpty Dumpty has been used to demonstrate the second law of thermodynamics. The law describes a process known as entropy , a measure of the number of specific ways in which a system may be arranged, often taken to be a measure of "disorder". The higher the entropy, the higher the disorder.
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After his fall and subsequent shattering, the inability to put him together again is representative of this principle, as it would be highly unlikely though not impossible to return him to his earlier state of lower entropy, as the entropy of an isolated system never decreases. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article is about the nursery rhyme. For other uses, see Humpty Dumpty disambiguation. Retrieved 18 September Oxford University Press, , 2nd edn. What I Learned Today.