06 April 2007

Poetry Friday: Politically Correct Nursery Rhymes

Will wonders never cease - nursery rhymes are now catch and release?

The other day, Miss M. woke us up to recite a nursery rhyme that she'd learned at school:

One, two, three, four, five,
Once I caught a fish alive.
Six, seven, eight, nine, ten,
Then I let him go again.
Which litte finger did he bite?
This little finger on the right.

I'd never heard this one before, so I googled it and found a bunch of versions. Interestingly, all the other versions had 8 lines - Miss M. managed to leave two out, but it still scans okay. Furthermore, in her version, it seems to imply that the fish bit the finger in lieu of a hook, like noodling for catfish, instead of the biting of the finger being the reason to release the fish.

4 comments:

  1. Anonymous10:25 AM

    Or this may be the older-toddler version of Z. singing the alphabet song and leaving out the letters between D and H, the letter K, the letter P, and everything after V. She's remarkably consistent in this, but I'm certain I sing her the whole thing.

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  2. I heard that version on Barney.

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  3. Anonymous6:28 PM

    At my preschool -- and this was so long ago that it was called nursery school -- we used to sing:

    A-hunting we will go
    A-hunting we will go
    We'll catch a fox
    And put him in a box
    And then we'll let him go


    Somehow, I don't think that that's the way it actually works.

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  4. Bossy misses the old days when the Nursery Rhymes always ended with a bloody hook and fish guts.

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