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Ring Around the Rosie is simply a nursery rhyme of indefinite origin and no specific meaning, and someone, long after the fact, concocted an inventive explanation for its creation. If few people realize that a seemingly happy little nursery rhyme actually refers to the Black Plague, so much the better, because the explanation presented above is apocryphal. The Black Plague was the disease we call bubonic plague, spread by a bacillus usually carried by rodents and transmitted to humans by fleas. The plague first hit western Europe in 1347, and by 1350 it had killed nearly a third of the population. Although some of the details of the plague offered in this putative Ring Around the Rosie explanation are reasonably accurate (sneezing was one of the symptoms of a form of the plague, for example, and some people did use flowers, incense, and perfumed oils to try to ward off the disease), the notion that they were behind the creation of this nursery rhyme is extremely implausible for a number of reasons: [Ring Around the Rosie is sometimes said to have originated with a later outbreak of the plague which occurred in London in 1665, to which all of the following reasoning applies as well.] Quite a fervent imagination is required to maintain that any of these variations has anything to do with a plague, and since they were all collected within a few years of each other, how could anyone determine that the plague version of Ring Around the Rosie was the original, and the other versions later corruptions of it? (And why is it that this rhyme supposedly remained intact for five centuries, then suddenly started sprouting all sorts of variations only in the late nineteenth century?) The explanations of the rhyme's true meaning are inconsistent, and they seem to be contrived to match whichever version of Ring Around the Rosie the teller is familiar with. For example, the purpose of the pocket full of posies is said to be any one of the following: Likewise, multiple meanings are claimed for the repetition of ashes at the beginning of the last line: The word ashes cannot be a corruption of the sneezing sounds made by the infected person and a word used for its literal meaning. Either ashes was a corruption of an earlier form or a deliberate use; it can't be both. Moreover, the ashes ending of Ring Around the Rosie appears to be a fairly modern addition to the rhyme; earlier versions repeat other words or syllables instead (e.g., Hush!, A-tischa!, Hasher, Husher, Hatch-u, A-tishoo) or, as noted above, have completely different endings. 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.) So, what does Ring Around the Rosie mean, then? Folklorist Philip Hiscock suggests: Like A Tisket, A Tasket or Hey Diddle Diddle or even I Am the Walrus, the rhyme we call Ring Around the Rosie has no particular meaning, regardless of our latter day efforts to create one for it. They're all simply collections of words and sounds that someone thought sounded good together. As John Lennon once explained:
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