At 4/10/08 05:11 AM, ms2492 wrote:
At 4/10/08 02:13 AM, Omega-Epsilon wrote:
Everything from out childhood just HAD to have adult undertones, wasn't 'Ring Around The Rosy' supposed to be about AIDS?
No it was about the black plague when it was about.
The sneezing part of the rhyme is about how sneezing is one of the first symptoms and then they die soon after it... :D
or something like that :)
Taken from Wikipedia:
Folklore scholars regard the theory as baseless for various reasons:
1. the late appearance of the explanation means that it has no tradition, only the value of its content;[15]
2. the facts described do not fit especially well at least with the Great Plague;[17][20]
3. the great variety of forms makes it unlikely that the modern form is the most ancient one, and the words on which the interpretation are based are not found in many of the earliest records of the rhyme (see above);[18][21]
4. European and 19th century versions of the rhyme suggest that this 'fall' was not a literal falling down, but a curtsy or other form of bending movement that was common in other dramatic singing games.
I myself don't believe the song has anything to do with the bubonic plague. Mainly because the line that can be interpreted as a sneeze isn't present in the original version:
Ring-a-ring-a-roses,
A pocket full of posies;
Hush! hush! hush! hush!
We're all tumbled down.
At 4/10/08 03:29 AM, Sawke wrote:
I heard the guy was on meth when he wrote it! and that he touched children...who knows there's so much crazy stuff people say about Lewis Carrol i don't really care. it's a pretty good story.
Meth wasn't synthesized until 8 years after the book was published, another impossibility. Though it was observed that he was indeed a pedophile, he supposedly never touched a child. He took pictures of them in the nude and said it was for artistic endeavors and was never found to have ever acted on his desires (though we have no proof that he didn't either).