Intolerance

 

Humpty Dumpty

And all the king’s horsemen and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again

Wait, that’s not right, is it?

My wife and her sister have a small business on Etsy. On the items that they sell is a cloth book of the children’s nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty. My wife’s sister designs the fabric, and my wife sews the fabric. The line above is how it appears in their fabric book. A disgruntled customer was upset because in her opinion it should  have been “all the king’s horses”,  not “all the king’s horsemen.”  She was offered a refund including shipping both ways if she retuned the book. She refused. She wanted the fabric to be reprinted and the book to be  changed. This was not possible. She wanted the book to be no longer sold to others because it contained an “error” and left a bad review because of that. In other words, she wanted her opinion to be imposed on others.

This sounds like someone who is concerned with the letter of the law and not justice, the spirit of the law. I bet that customer also thinks she is being a good Christian which makes her better than other religions, and non-Americans who don’t speak English and are not as white as her. Who is going to tell her that that Jesus Christ was a Jew, didn’t speak English, didn’t live in the United States and was not as white as her?

She also should realize  that her preferred wording is not the only way that the nursery rhyme has even appeared. According to Wikipedia the first appearance of the Poem in 1797 was

Four-score Men and Four-score more,
Could not make Humpty Dumpty where he was before.

In 1810 it appeared as

Threescore men and threescore more,
Cannot place Humpty dumpty as he was before.

Elsewhere in that poem, “Humpty” was spelled “Humpti” and “sat” was spelled as “sate” but that is another issue.

The current version did not appear until 1882.

The poem was thought to be a riddle, where Humpty Dumpty is an egg, which is speculated as Dutch slang for Egg. Which reminds of an English coworker who triggered a spit take by me when he made the comment that he spent the weekend "knocking up" an old girlfriend. He meant that he “was visiting”,  not what I thought he meant. Two great civilizations separated by a common language indeed! The motto for the state of my birth is “Hope” which came from a misunderstanding by the early English settlers that the nearby Native American village was Mount Hope. The natives were saying “mantoup” in their language

From Wikipedia

In 1996, the website of the Colchester tourist board attributed the origin of the rhyme to a cannon recorded as used from the church of St Mary-at-the-Wall by the Royalist defenders in the siege of 1648.In 1648, Colchester was a walled town with a castle and several churches and was protected by the city wall. The story given was that a large cannon, which the website claimed was colloquially called Humpty Dumpty, was strategically placed on the wall. A shot from a Parliamentary cannon succeeded in damaging the wall beneath Humpty Dumpty, which caused the cannon to tumble to the ground. The Royalists (or Cavaliers, "all the King's men") attempted to raise Humpty Dumpty on to another part of the wall, but the cannon was so heavy that "All the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't put Humpty together again".

The poem has also been advanced as a story based on the Laws of Thermodynamics because once broken an egg, Humpty Dumpty, could not be but together again because its entropy has increased.

In any event, on this night when the 95^th Oscars are to be awarded, it is only a story anyway. If someone objects to how you are telling a story and calls you illiterate, they are probably projecting and confirming that they are illiterate, not you. Besides to be “woke” shouldn’t it be "horsepersons" any way. J