Creepy nursery rhymes
Oct. 8th, 2020 09:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
prozacparkI haven’t posted in who knows how long (292 weeks, according to DW, WOW) but I really don’t know where else content about creepy nursery rhymes belongs. I post on Twitter some, and had gotten into Tumblr for a while, but let that slide into oblivion, too.
Life update, in case I decide to talk about these things here: I’ve been married to my partner (Jehanzeb) of six years for about three years now, and we have a baby (Shehrazad) who just turned one. I have gone straight from post baby isolation into pandemic quarantine, so life has been otherwise uneventful. I’m watching a lot of stuff, but not feeling fannish about anything in particular.
So, I just realized that the childhood rhyme:
“Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater
Had a wife but could not keep her
So he kept her in a pumpkin shell
And there he kept her very well“
we learned in nursery school has creepy and misogynistic origins. Why did no one tell me this before? Jehanzeb had never heard it before, so his response to me singing it to baby was, “That sounds like a serial murder story about a man keeping dead bodies in a pumpkin.” But I had somehow never realized that it totally did?
So I looked it up and it’s about a man whose wife kept cheating on him, thus his being unable to “keep her” and how he got tired of it and killed her and hid her body (in pieces!) in a pumpkin.
And here I thought that it was about a poor couple who could not afford to buy a home and made do with what they had and lived happily with each other.
In other news, it’s October in the middle of a worldwide pandemic and I need a place to talk about horror. So this shall be it. I’m really looking forward to Bly Manor and Rebecca.
Life update, in case I decide to talk about these things here: I’ve been married to my partner (Jehanzeb) of six years for about three years now, and we have a baby (Shehrazad) who just turned one. I have gone straight from post baby isolation into pandemic quarantine, so life has been otherwise uneventful. I’m watching a lot of stuff, but not feeling fannish about anything in particular.
So, I just realized that the childhood rhyme:
“Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater
Had a wife but could not keep her
So he kept her in a pumpkin shell
And there he kept her very well“
we learned in nursery school has creepy and misogynistic origins. Why did no one tell me this before? Jehanzeb had never heard it before, so his response to me singing it to baby was, “That sounds like a serial murder story about a man keeping dead bodies in a pumpkin.” But I had somehow never realized that it totally did?
So I looked it up and it’s about a man whose wife kept cheating on him, thus his being unable to “keep her” and how he got tired of it and killed her and hid her body (in pieces!) in a pumpkin.
And here I thought that it was about a poor couple who could not afford to buy a home and made do with what they had and lived happily with each other.
In other news, it’s October in the middle of a worldwide pandemic and I need a place to talk about horror. So this shall be it. I’m really looking forward to Bly Manor and Rebecca.
