Title: Goosey Goosey Gander Mother Goose of Animal Verse

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Despite its brevity, there are several literary devices at work in ‘‘Goosey goosey gander.’These include but are not limited to:

Nursery rhymes are weird, right? All that talk of tuffets and bridges falling down…Most of us learned these rhymes as toddlers and have been reciting them from memory ever since, giving no thought to what we’re actually saying. For an over-thinker like me, this is simply not acceptable, and I decided to dig into some nursery rhymes’ meanings. Egerton Leigh, A Glossary of Words Used in the Dialect of Cheshire (1877) essentially repeats Wilbraham's wording for gander-month and adds two entries for gonder: The complication here is pointed out by John Jamieson, Supplement to the Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, volume 1 (1825): How in Italy it’s not Santa Claus who gives gifts to all the children. It’s La Befana, a friendly witch! No, there’s nothing particularly inflammatory about the lines “Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Mo, Catch a tiger by his toe.” Different versions of the tune popped up around the world, and most are appropriately innocent. The late 19th/early 20th century version in the United States was explicitly racist, though, with a racial slur in place of the tiger kids catch today. That version has, for good reason, fallen out of favor.Roger Wilbraham, An Attempt at a Glossary of Some Words Used in Cheshire, second edition (1826), published 60 years earlier, doesn't include an entry for gonder (or gander) at all, although it does have one for gander-month: With regard to the origin of gander in the sense of "take a long look at," it's interesting to compare the definitions of gonder in Thomas Darlington, Folk-Speech of South Cheshire (1887) with the corresponding definitions in Robert Holland, A Glossary of Words Used in the County of Cheshire (1886)—just one year earlier. In the first lines of ‘Goosey goosey gander,’ the speaker uses the phrase that later came to be used as the title. Whether this poem had an alternate title is unknown, but it is far from uncommon to see these older rhymes named for their first lines. If not this, then some repeated element within the text may be used as the title. There were many hiding holes put into the Catholic Churches of the time because they needed to have places for the priests to hide from persecutors. This is quite important for the religious people of the time because they tried to protect their priests, and they were often present if a priest was discovered.

Mama Lisa’s Christmas Around The World is a celebration of the diversity and love with which many different cultures mark this joyful time of year. In the 16th Century, England was in religious turmoil. Through the reigns of the Tudor monarchs Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth, both Protestants and Catholics suffered from religious persecution.So what’s the real explanation? One theory holds that the lyrics don’t mean anything. They were just something for kids to recite as they skipped in a ring—the closest young Protestants could come to dancing in the 1880s, as their elders had banned that particular form of entertainment.