Hello Pat, I found your post both intriguing and thought provoking.
Like all the best stories, nursery rhymes have so many lairs of subtlety: such sinister tales, clocked in a riming allegory, so many of which we arbitrarily chant to our children. As a person of the 20th century, these rhymes remind me of nothing more sinister than my childhood. It’s later as a teenager or adult that I became curious and started to research the meaning behind these oral time capsules.
Sometimes I wonder what children, who in their childhood innocents have listened to the songs of artist such as Ariana Grande, will think as adults listening to the lyrics. Dark adult sexualisation and greed is endemic through-out all our popular culture, and yet this is what we allow our children to grow up on.
Myth, fairytale and nursery rhymes chart the path humanity has taken through time; full of murder, deceit, disease and corruption. As far as I can tell, as a species we remain essentially the same.
Hello Pat, I found your post both intriguing and thought provoking.
Like all the best stories, nursery rhymes have so many lairs of subtlety: such sinister tales, clocked in a riming allegory, so many of which we arbitrarily chant to our children. As a person of the 20th century, these rhymes remind me of nothing more sinister than my childhood. It’s later as a teenager or adult that I became curious and started to research the meaning behind these oral time capsules.
Sometimes I wonder what children, who in their childhood innocents have listened to the songs of artist such as Ariana Grande, will think as adults listening to the lyrics. Dark adult sexualisation and greed is endemic through-out all our popular culture, and yet this is what we allow our children to grow up on.
Myth, fairytale and nursery rhymes chart the path humanity has taken through time; full of murder, deceit, disease and corruption. As far as I can tell, as a species we remain essentially the same.
Thank you for your thoughts on this post, Cliona. You're right, we don't seem to have progressed much as a species over the last few hundred years.