The other day, at the ETC Book Cafe (USED book cafe!), I picked up a little gem for four dollars

[conuly]

A whole book (okay, not that long a book, but still) on "play-party" songs - you know, like Ring Around the Rosie, or The Farmer in the Dell?

This sort of thing is totally irresistible to me, and I'm just so lucky - for Christmas, I got me an annotated Mother Goose there, too, and I also have a book of Australian jump rope rhymes.

Anyway, in my play-party book, I was surprised to note that they list Bingo, but not at all the way I was taught! It's a walk-around-in-a-circle-and-jump song, no clapping. Weird how things change, isn't it?

Similarly, in another book I'm reading right now, they list two ways to play Ring Around the Rosie, and neither one is the way I (or, probably, most of us) heard it growing up. One ends, after "posy" with "fall down and break your nosey!", and the other (also after posy) ends "with a curtsy here and a curtsy there, and a curtsy all together" and the appropriate motions for that instead of just plopping your butt down on the ground.

Oh, I know I've mentioned it before, it just always surprises me, is all. You grow up with one form of a nursery rhyme or song, and you just believe that it's the only one everybody knows! And I even know better, I love this stuff, I shouldn't be surprised anymore.

Comments

I like those things too.

[marveen.livejournal.com]

I like counting rhymes and so forth also.

I also loved Sheri S. Tepper's fictional jumprope rhymes:

On the road, the old road, a tower made of stone.
In the tower hangs a bell which cannot ring alone.
Shadow bell rang the dark, Daylight bell the dawn.
In the tower hung the bells, now the tower's gone.