[ExI] Striving for Objectivity Across Different Cultures

[BillK]

On Sat, Aug 9, 2008 at 11:16 PM, Lee Corbin wrote:
<snip>
> English speaking children, incidentally, and quite
> beautifully, have their own way of remembering the
> Black Death. Every spring the six- and seven-year-olds
> take the four- and five-year-olds by the hand, and
> teach them to play "Ring around the Rosey"[1]. They
> have their way of remembering the terrible event,
> and we have ours.
>

Hey! Don't believe him, Stefano!  :)
That's just one of those made up stories that's so good, it *must* be true.

Snopes disagrees:
<http://www.snopes.com/language/literary/rosie.asp>

Wikipedia disagrees:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_a_Ring_o'_Roses>

And here:
<http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2008/07/08/2297794.htm?site=science/greatmomentsinscience>

As Snopes explains:
* Children were apparently reciting this plague-inspired nursery rhyme
for over six hundred years before someone finally figured out what
they were talking about, as the first known mention of a plague
interpretation of "Ring Around the Rosie" didn't show up until James
Leasor published The Plague and the Fire in 1961. This sounds
suspiciously like the "discovery," several decades after the fact,
that L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written as a coded
parable about Populism. How come no contemporaries of Baum — those
much closer in time and place to what he was writing about — ever
noticed this? The answer is that Baum merely authored a children's
book, and it was only much later that someone invented a fanciful
interpretation of it — an interpretation that has become more and more
layered and embellished over the years and has now become widely
accepted as "fact" despite all evidence to the contrary. It isn't
difficult to imagine that such a process has been applied to "Ring
Around the Rosie" as well, especially since we humans have such a
fondness for trying to make sense of the nonsensical, seeking to find
order in randomness, and especially for discovering and sharing
secrets. The older the secret, the better (because age demonstrates
the secret has eluded so many others before us), and so we've read
"hidden" meanings into all sorts of innocuous nursery rhymes: The dish
who ran away with the spoon in "Hey Diddle, Diddle" is really Queen
Elizabeth I (or Catherine of Aragon or Catherine the Great), or
"Humpty Dumpty" and "The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe" describe the
"spread and fragmentation of the British Empire." (The process is
aided by a general consensus that some nursery rhymes, such as "Old
King Cole," quite likely were actually based on real historical
figures.)
-------------


You have to be very careful before assigning modern interpretations to
old stories.
I would like to see written evidence from historical contemporaries.


BillK