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Jul. 21st, 2011 04:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nverland posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
carols_stuff
Humpty Dumpty
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again!
Origin?
According to the Oxford English Dictionary the term "humpty dumpty" referred to a drink of brandy boiled with ale in the seventeenth century.[1] The riddle probably exploited, for misdirection, the fact that "humpty dumpty" was also eighteenth-century reduplicative slang for a short and clumsy person.[3] The riddle may depend on the assumption that, whereas a clumsy person falling off a wall might not be irreparably damaged, an egg would be.[1] The rhyme is no longer posed as a riddle, since the answer is now so well known.[1] Similar riddles have been recorded by folklorists in other languages, such as "Boule Boule" in French, or "Lille Trille" in Swedish and Norwegian; though none is as widely known as Humpty Dumpty is in English.[1]
