Completing the world through (mock) rhyme

According to child development experts Sue Palmer and Ros Bayley, nursery rhymes with music significantly aid a child’s mental development and spatial reasoning, reported the BBC.

Seth Lerer, dean of arts and humanities at the University California – San Diego, has also emphasised the ability of nursery rhymes to foster emotional connections and cultivate language. “It is a way of completing the world through rhyme,” he said in an interview with NBC Today. “When we sing [them], we’re participating in something that bonds parent and child.”

Unknowingly when we sing these nursery rhymes we are engaging our child with centuries-old tradition that seems to be harmless on the surface.

Compiled from BBC, Top Tenz, Mental Floss and Listverse, here are 10 nursery rhymes which do not spell love, care and/or innocence (…)

Darunter diese beiden:

Mary, Mary, quite contrary
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockleshells
And pretty maids all in a row.

This one may be about Bloody Mary, daughter of King Henry VIII and concerns the torture and murder of Protestants. Queen Mary was a staunch Catholic and her “garden” here is an allusion to the graveyards which were filling with Protestant martyrs. The “silver bells” were thumbscrews; while “cockleshells” are believed to be instruments of torture which were attached to male genitals. Ouch!

Georgie Porgie pudding and pie,
Kissed the girls and made them cry
When the boys came out to play,
Georgie Porgie ran away.

This seemingly child-friendly nursery rhyme actually has a sexual undertone to it. Georgie Porgie is a caricature of George Villiers, a bisexual nobleman who lived from 1592 to 1628. George was greatly favored by King James I. His friendship with the king was so intimate that he was able to gain immense power and position in just a short period of time — he was named the first Duke of Buckingham at the age of 31.

(…)

Though George had a covert romantic affair with the king, he was a womanizer (…kissed the girls and made them cry…), and had sexual relationships with numerous women, including the daughters and even the wives of many English noblemen. Because the king favored him, the English noblemen were incapable of prosecuting him, thus explaining the line, “when the boys came out to play, Georgie Porgie ran away”.

/ Express Tribune