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A nursery rhyme is a traditional poem or song for children in Britain and other European countries, but usage of the term dates only from the late 18th/early 19th century. The term Mother Goose rhymes is interchangeable with nursery rhymes. [1] From the mid-16th century nursery rhymes began to be recorded in English plays, and most popular ...
The nursery rhyme is a form of teaching such associations in folklore: for individuals raised with such social codes, the phrase "rub-a-dub-dub" alone could stand in for gossip or innuendo without communicating all of the details.
"Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary" is an English nursery rhyme. The rhyme has been seen as having religious and historical significance, but its origins and meaning are disputed. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 19626.
Illustration from A Book of Nursery Rhymes (1901). "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe" – which can be spelled a number of ways – is a children's counting-out rhyme, used to select a person in games such as tag, or for selecting various other things. It is one of a large group of similar rhymes in which the child who is pointed to by the chanter on the ...
The terms "nursery rhyme" and "children's song" emerged in the 1820s, although this type of children's literature previously existed with different names such as Tommy Thumb Songs and Mother Goose Songs. [1]
A children's song may be a nursery rhyme set to music, a song that children invent and share among themselves or a modern creation intended for entertainment, use in the home or education. Although children's songs have been recorded and studied in some cultures more than others, they appear to be universal in human society.
Other interpretations exist. Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey note in Birds Britannica that the greylag goose has for millennia been associated with fertility, that "goose" still has a sexual meaning in British culture, and that the nursery rhyme preserves these sexual overtones ("In my lady's chamber"). [7] "
The rhyme is followed by a note: "This may serve as a warning to the proud and ambitious, who climb so high that they generally fall at last." [4]James Orchard Halliwell, in his The Nursery Rhymes of England (1842), notes that the third line read "When the wind ceases the cradle will fall" in the earlier Gammer Gurton's Garland (1784) and himself records "When the bough bends" in the second ...