BBC under fire for rewriting nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty
October 19th, 2009 - 2:44 pm ICT by ANI ( 1 comment )London, Oct 19 (ANI): The BBC has come under fire after rewriting nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty and giving it a happy ending.
The words had been changed for a CBeebies kids’ show, where instead of the old version:
“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again”
The last line was changed to:
“Made Humpty Dumpty happy again.”
Labour MP Tom Harris watched the show, which is called Something Special, with his sons aged three and five, and was very much put off by the change.
“For goodness sake. Kids should be exposed to real life a bit, not cosseted away,” the Sun quoted him as saying.
“We need to stop this moronic activity. Let them see colourful and violent cartoons, and let them be children,” he stated.The Glasgow South MP said he had also seen Little Miss Muffet changed on the channel so she made friends with the spider rather than fled.
Language expert Lynne Truss accused the Beeb of trying to shield children from real emotions.
“I was terrified by all these things when I was a child and it didn’t do me harm,” she said.
Nick Seaton, who is the chairman of The Campaign for Real Education, was also not in favour of it.
“Nursery rhymes are a gentle way to ease children into the real world,” he explained.
“Children are being told everything is rosy and aren’t being raised to confront problems,” he said.
But a BBC spokeswoman said the change was just for creative purposes.
“The small change to Humpty Dumpty was for no other reason than being creative and entertaining,” she added. (ANI)
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Tags: bbc, beeb, creative purposes, favour, glasgow, goodness sake, humpty dumpty, labour mp, language expert, lynne truss, nursery rhyme, nursery rhymes, old version, real education, real emotions, real world, seaton, spokeswoman, tom harris, violent cartoons
October 26th, 2009 at 3:50 am
Humpty Dumpty - is Pharaoh you silly EGGHEADS!
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
Threescore men and threescore more
Cannot place Humpty Dumpty as he was before.
Halliwell James Orchard, pub: 1853
The 1897 version edited by Andrew Lang did not rhyme as well in the last verse “Cannot make Humpty Dumpty as before again.”
1score = 20 units
3 score = 60 units
30 score = 600 units
Assume just for one moment we drop the big word ‘THIRTY’ down to ‘three’ for children who can only count to five, or up it for eggheads like ourselves and what do we get ?
Exodus 14:7 Also, he took 600 choice chariots, (and then some more, with captains on every one of them!)
Exodus 14:9 all the horses and all the chariots
Exodus 14:26 all the horsemen and chariots
Exodus 15 SONG of Moses! Vs 1+4+10 (sank like lead- the proverbial fall of the wall) +19
Exodus 16 Miriam’s SONG (she sang the chorus line….. in response to the song of Moses) vs. 21: Horse and rider into the sea
The water was described as a WALL (Exodus 14:22, 29) both on the left and the right hand side of the parting! As Humpty Dumpty could not sit on a wall of water, he had a great fall off the wall of water, only to be ‘broken’ and un-repairable.
Pharaoh’s Blue or War Crown made the head look:
1) oversized
2) Oval shaped as an egghead.
This made him appear superior to you and me, in knowledgeable, skill, a trained and gifted deity with an oversized brain head – otherwise described as ‘egghead’. Google any Egyptian relief like touregypt.net for relief on Amenhoptep III.
Today we understand the surge and speed of water in Tsunami’s, and if Migdol has the Hebrew meaning of “raised or elevated” as illustrated in the still present Migdal Ha’emek which is a large hill surrounded by the Kishon River, then its not a far stretch to assume a “Migdol” (small typo on the O and the A?) to have once existed in Lower Egypt between the Sea and Etham which was on the edge of the Shur Wilderness. Since we eggheads also understand volcanoes set off tsunami’s – well the cloud cover during the day protecting them from the desert heat, and the pillar of fire to guide them at night is not a far stretch from a volcano at all!
Side note: Now we just need some clever fool (aka egghead) to submit Moses was heading for the Kings Highway, but God knowing the road was guarded and the slaves were not schooled in war craft, knowing they would falter and run back to Pharaoh for protection with all his military chariots and horsemen, God told Moses to TURN Exodus 13:17….. (hence the angel bearing the light switched to their rear!)
Thomas A Petty M.D said in Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (1953) The Tragedy of Humpty Dumpty, “these simple enigmatic lines constitute one of the most popular of the nursery rhymes. … attested by students of linguistics (who) believe that it is one of those great pieces of antiquity of which is to be measured in thousands of years, or rather, it is so great that it cannot be measured at all.
He quotes Ruth Thomas who explained it as a “catastrophic drama”, but missed the mark on the sibling rivalry; she came closer than most by identifying the mother-child relationship, as this was the way it was handed down. With great enduring love, respect for God, while also cautioning your child not to be an EGGHEAD!
Moving on, exchange the word ‘place’ and ‘make’ with the egghead word ‘RESTORE’ and what do we get?
Speaking to the last verse, consider the possibility of Pharaoh being able to RESTORE to his kingdom 600 000 slave men, plus all the gold, livestock and other wealth the Egyptians had allowed the Jews to take freely, for fear of God’s retribution. Exodus 12: 35-36. (God warned all of us not to store and idolize treasures on earth… from the admonishing/disparaging mum again!) But Pharaoh lost all of that, AND all his military strength in men, horses and chariots which were the ultimate status symbol of military might in the day, and his LIFE! (Exodus 14:28)
Nor could Pharaoh’s military men and their ‘might’ restore the Pharaoh his ‘egghead’ reputation of greatness.
Another item of note is the French version appears to have been recorded earlier than the English version. Hippolytus (AD 170-236) puts names to the disciples who travelled to Britain, naming Joseph (of Arimathea?). The Archbishop of Mainz Rabanus details Joseph of Arimathea travelling in the company of the two Bethany sisters, Mary and Martha, Lazarus, Mary Magdalen and more, and then parting company in France. William of Malmesbury mentions Joseph of Arimathea co-founding Glastonbury Abbey. These were all Jewish descendants of the Exodus! I would take my rhymes with me wherever I moved - wouldn’t you?
footnotes, sci.tech-archive.net describes Amenhoptep III’s embalming to have occurred long after his death (not traditional), found broken ribs and signs of being crushed (Mommy here …reminds you of the weight of a wall of water coming down on you!) People observe the massive size of Amenhoptep III’s tomb (35 hectares), the overwhelming volume of statues - 600 plus, the appearance of ‘rush’ with only painted tomb walls, lacking detail like wall carvings. The lack to explain why this is the only temple built to partially accommodate a seasonal flooding, or his body covered in hundreds of lotus water lilies instead of jewels. (Ps: the color was symbolic too!) (Count the petals, single flowering less than 25, double flowering less than 50, this too carries its myth, 24 and 48 are mythical numbers too.)
With the greatest humility I beg to be forgiven by quoting Tolkien, a true professional philologist especially in linguistic aesthetics, should his family consider me to be quoting ‘out of context’. From his letter number 131, “Myth and fairy story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit… After all I believe that the legends and myths are largely made of ‘truth’ and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode…..”
So when Adrienne Mayor links paleontology and mythology together in a study of Geomythology, you had better believe she is onto something with deeper truth. When diminutive human remains are found on a remote Indonesian island of Flores, right in the region where “Gulliver’s Travels” map points too, and you read Swift not only sailed the seas for a period, but also made great friends with seafaring men, for him and his ‘writing pals’ to have expanded on an ‘old seadog’ story of little people out there somewhere, is that not what and how stories are created?
If Way of Tao describes “In myths, what Trickster does is always the opposite of what is considered sacred. Like the process of dreaming, Trickster leads you through stages in mysterious steps to ‘TRICK’ you into growth. We see this in American Indian stories that are humorously interwoven with bits and pieces of truth and insight.” Then look no further than their Legend of the Seven Stars, which cites on the annual appearance of those stars, the fish are abundant in the river. Do they refer to the same beautiful group of stars known as Pleiades, or the Greek’s seven sisters, in the neck of Taurus, and also mentioned in scriptures? Seven stars, seven churches, seven (inner circle) seas, yikes I sound like Mario Bros now!
If all that is too much pie in the sky, then take heed of God’s word in Exodus 12:26 ‘When your children say, ‘What do you mean by this service we observe?’ Ex 13:9 and 13: 16 says “ It shall be as a sign to you on (in) your hand and as a memorial between your eyes” and “ It shall be as a sign on your hands and as frontlets between your eyes.. the Lord brought us out of Egypt .” Also Ex 12:22 “Take a bunch of hyssop, dip it in the blood …, and strike the lintel and the two doorpost with the blood”. Think about this, ever screamed at the kids “don’t touch the door frames as you pass through!!”, and they do, they hang and swing their little bodies right off the posts as usual, then they smack their foreheads to remind themselves they were warned, and where did the paint go ?????? Pharaoh could not accuse the Jews for the slaughter of all first born children and animals when all the door frames had NO BLOOD SMUDGING, and all the Jews hands were clean of blood!!!! God was telling us STRAIGHT UP (no mister nice guy here) to symbolically smack our memory/temple/foreheads with either the left or right hand, reminding ourselves of what He did for us, as we stuff food in our mouth!
So can all the EGGHEADS stand up in the room, take an egg in the left and right hand and SMACK their temples please!
PS: can all the kids stop gaming for a moment and pursue with equal zest the mythological clues to help us EGGHEADS remember the warnings and messages our ancestors planted deep in our hearts, like ‘the meaning of the grail entrusted to Joseph of Arimathea’?
Is it no wonder that Psalm 119 is the longest? Every one of the songs contributed to that Psalm have ONE thing in common…. Your WORD have I hidden deep in my heart so that I may not sin against you.
Lets start with NOT changing the Humpty Dumpty rhyme to suit ourselves – like politics today!
Michelle White
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