Pop goes the weasel? Why are these nursery rhymes misinforming children?

Question

I tried it and the best I could manage was a dull thud in the microwave: Children should be taught the truth

Answer 1

Children! Throw of the burdens of nursery rhymes, they wil teach you nothing about real life!

The only one you need to know to get by:

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her father fourty whacks
And when she saw what she had done
She gave her mother fourty-one

Answer 2

Far from mis-informing children, Pop goes the weasel gives an abject lesson in household and financial managemenent.

"Up and down the City Road"

The City Road is in London, between the Angel, Islington, and Old Street, in the City of London itself. It was a major local shopping street, full of butchers, fishmongers and greengrocers, which is where we shopped in the days before supermarkets. I t served, and still serves, a major residential area. Zone theory as per the Chicago School does not apply in its simplest form in London.

"In and out the Eagle"

The Eagle is a public house (bar), on the City Road, and it still exists. In London, the pub was, and still is, a major social centre. People would be in and out of the pub for a quick drink, smoke, and exchange of gossip, throughout the day.

"That's the way the money goes".

Self explanatory. The rhyme has already stated

"Half a pound of tuppenny rice, half a pound of treacle"

Money from the poor purse was spent in buying goods in small quantities - there were no freezers when the rhyme was coined. Houses for the poor were small, and lacked cellars and larders and similar cool storage spaces. So food was bought as needed.

"Pop goes the weasel".

'Weasel' is used to this day in various dialects throughout England, as a general term for money. In my native Tyneside, to say "I'm weaselled" means "I have just been paid, and am in funds". To be 'weaselled out' means that funds are low, or non-existant. To 'weasel' is a common dialect word for earning money by means of subterfuge, e.g by petty theft, gambling, running an illicit whiskey-still, and similar skullduggery. Weasel is also a term for feeling at ease, which is commensurate among the poor with having enough money to buy food, pay the rent and have enough left for a beer or two in the "Eagle". In this case, 'Weasel' derives from the word 'Ease', and its use can still be found in its purest form in Western Ireland, where an 'Easy' day is a day without any troublesome weather phenomena, a bed made 'Easy' is a bed made loosely (so that the sheets/blankets are not too tight, thus facilitating sexual intercourse), and a person may describe himself as being 'Easy', meaning that there is no ill-will upon him.

I hope this clarifies the issue a little.

Answer 3

Check out the origins of nursery rhymes...

The Nursery Rhyme, 'Pop goes the weasel' sounds quite incomprehensible in this day an age! The origins of the rhyme are believed to date back to the 1700's. We have listed two versions of the rhyme on this page. The first rhyme is the better known version - some translation is in order!

Pop and Weasel?
These words are derived from Cockney Rhyming slang which originated in London. Cockneys were a close community and had a suspicion of strangers and a dislike of the Police (they still do!) Cockneys developed a language of their own based roughly on a rhyming slang - it was difficult for strangers to understand as invariably the second noun would always be dropped. Apples and Pears ( meaning stairs) would be abbreviated to just 'apples', for instance, "watch your step on the apples". To "Pop" is the slang word for "Pawn". Weasel is derived from "weasel and stoat" meaning coat. It was traditional for even poor people to own a suit, which they wore as their 'Sunday Best'. When times were hard they would pawn their suit, or coat, on a Monday and claim it back before Sunday. Hence the term " Pop goes the Weasel"

In and out the Eagle?
The words to the Rhyme are "Up and down the City road, in and out the Eagle -
That’s the way the money goes - Pop! goes the weasel". The Eagle refers to 'The Eagle Tavern' a pub which is located on the corner of City Road and Shepherdess Walk in Hackney, North London. The Eagle was an old pub which was re-built as a music hall in 1825. Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was known to frequent the Music Hall. It was purchased by the Salvation Army in 1883 ( they were totally opposed to drinking and Music Halls). The hall was later demolished and was rebuilt as a public house in 1901.

Alternative Lyrics
"A penny for a spool of thread, a penny for a needle" - this version has led to a 'weasel' being interpreted as a shuttle or bobbin, as used by silk weavers, being pawned in a similar way as the suits or jackets owned by the Cockneys.

Answer 4

What is wrong about it?

The story goes that a monkey chased a weasel 'all around the mulberry bush'. The monkey thought he was playing a clever game, when the weasel 'pop's.

The 'pop' can be a metaphor for any number of things, the most likely being that the weasel got away or he attacked the monkey.

Answer 5

Let's try to shed some light on this matter.

Half a pound of tuppenny rice,
Half a pound of treacle.
That’s the way the money goes,
Pop goes the weasel.

Up and down the City road,
In and out the Eagle,
That’s the way the money goes,
Pop goes the weasel.

Every night when I go out
the monkey’s on the table.
Take a stick and knock it off
Pop goes the weasel.

A penny for a ball of thread
Another for a needle,
That’s the way the money goes,
pop goes the weasel.

All around the cobblers bench
the monkey chased the people;
The donkey thought ’twas all in fun,
pop goes the weasel. Before anybody rushes to put fingers to keyboard, let me say that this is by no means the only version of the lyric. There are several others, especially from the United States. But this is the usual British version, a famous catchy rhyme (or at least, as you say, the first two verses are).

The earliest reference I can find to music with this name actually comes from the United States, from sheet music entitled “Pop goes the Weasel for Fun and Frolic”, published in 1850 by Messrs Miller and Beacham of Baltimore. Another from three years later refers to “the latest English dance” and also “an old English Dance lately revived”, so it seems to have been imported from Britain. None of these early versions had any lyrics apart from a repeated “Pop goes the weasel”, the catch line of the dance, which was sung or shouted by the dancers as one pair of them darted under the arms of the others. Several references in books and magazines suggest that the tune soon became extremely well known, and that pop goes the weasel became a catchphrase, as it later did in Britain. There have been suggestions that the phrase was intended to be ribald or erotic, though the explanations I’ve seen are somewhat fanciful.

Following first publication of this article, David Joyce wrote that: “The tune is a version of that used for the country dance, The Haymakers, which has the same form as Strip the Willow, and Bab at the Bowster (a couple hold hands, forming a bridge, which the other couples have to pass under). The tune was published in Gow’s Repository, issued in four volumes between 1799 and 1820. Thus the tune was around at least half a century before the American publication of Pop Goes The Weasel, but is certainly very much older. (It is similar to the tune used for Humpty Dumpty, and not far removed from Lilliebulero and Rock A-bye Baby, all jigs traceable back to the seventeenth century.)”

The first British mention of the phrase pop goes the weasel dates from an advertisement by Boosey and Sons of 1854 which described “the new country dance ‘Pop goes the weasel’, introduced by her Majesty Queen Victoria” (a puff to be taken with a large pinch of salt, we may assume). It would seem from the dates that the title was taken from the American publication of 1850.

Talking of Queen Victoria, I found these words attached to the tune in the March 1860 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger of Richmond, Virginia:

Queen Victoria’s very sick,
Prince Albert’s got the measles.
The children have the whooping cough,
And pop! Goes the weasel. Her Majesty would not have been amused.

Your version was a British music-hall song of the latter part of the Victorian period (quite when I haven’t been able to discover); it is highly probable that the words were composed to the tune of the earlier dance because everyone on both sides of the Atlantic seems to have the same one, even if the words are different.

Some of the references are now quite opaque, but we can take a fair shot at a few. In the second verse, the City Road was—still is—a well-known street in London, more than a mile long. The Eagle was a famous public house and music hall, which lay near the east end of the road on the corner of Shepherdess Walk; this had started its life as a tea-garden, but was turned into a music hall in 1825 (one of the very first); it ended its days as a Salvation Army centre and was pulled down in 1901. However, it was replaced by another pub, which still exists under the same name.

The City Road had a pawnbroker’s shop near its west end and to pop was a well-known phrase at the time for pawning something. So the second verse says that visiting the Eagle causes one’s money to vanish, necessitating a trip up the City Road to Uncle to raise some cash. But what was the weasel that was being pawned? Nobody is sure. Some suggest it was a domestic or tailor’s flat-iron, a small item easy to carry. My own guess is that it’s rhyming slang: weasel and stoat = coat. Either way, it seems to have been a punning reinterpretation of the catch line from the older dance.

The first verse just refers to a couple of domestic food items; the fourth to sewing or tailors’ requisites. The third introduces the monkey, one sense of that word being a nineteenth-century term for a drinking vessel in a public house, which makes sense in context. (It may derive from an older phrase, to suck the monkey, to drink from a bottle, which was also used by dock workers in London for illicitly drinking brandy from a cask by inserting a straw through the bung.) A stick was a shot of spirits, such as rum or brandy; to knock it off was to knock it back, or drink it. (There have been many other slang meanings of monkey, some extremely rude, of which the most famous is perhaps that for £500 or $500; from context, this is unlikely to be the meaning meant!)

The reference to the monkey in the fifth verse stumps me; in this case it seems to be a real beast. It could be one belonging to an organ-grinder, an itinerant musician who played a small portable organ, of whom there were many at this period. But I suspect there are topical or slang references in there that are now lost.

This was in the days before the abomination that is PC.

Answer 6

Most of the nursery rhymes were to teach children right from wrong in the 15th-16th century when the world was completely different from what it is today. Most of them had religious undertones too. But I do agree that they should be taught the truth, maybe we should come up with some new ones for the new millenium???.........you start lol..

Answer 7

That doesn't say much for you - even children know not to stick the weasel in the microwave - there purpose is to make learning fun and no one takes it seriously - peter peter pumpkin eater? the man didn't really live in a pumpkin it was just a clever metaphor to present his messed up life to children in a form that was socially and emotionally suitable.

Answer 8

It's possible that you're misinterpreting the 'pop'. Maybe the weasel stopped to have a beer (I'd say Valium, but I don't think they had Valium in the middle ages). Anyway, I think you may have wasted a perfectly good weasel. If you try again, why not just put a beer down by the mulberry bush & see if he stops to drink it? I'll bet he does, and my theory that he merely stopped to pop a couple of beers should prove viable.

Now can someone please explain Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater to me?

Answer 9

Obviously not a cockney. The derivation is "weasel" = "whistle" ="Whistle & flute" rhyming slang for "suit". To pop is to pawn. This refers to the practice of paying the bills (half a pound of tuppenny rice etc), running out of cash and pawning the old man's suit to tide you over until next pay day. Oh and you probably had a couple of beers "in and out of the Eagle" - probably the Eagle and Child, a famous pub.

Answer 10

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