h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I always learnt it as "a-tishoo, a-tishoo" or however you write it, the point being that you sneeze.

And please let's not restart the octopuses/octopi/octopodes debate.

People in Ireland say "asha" when they sneeze.

Why has the first part of the compound word quagmire disappeared? I would like the feel of a Quag underfoot I think, where as a mire just sounds plain lazy. Onomatopoeic quag goes by the by, but mire hangs round! One can only admire someone who drops onomatopoeic into a verbal conversation at least here I don't have to pronounce it

"True, but we have been cautioned not to seem dismissive or superior with our déjà vu."

What about dismissive superiority with our hindsight? Is that still OK?

Forget Quag +Mire. I would like to know what an indefinite comparitive is?
" So I can't really be sure but i think they are similiar!"
am I getting lost here?

I learnt "Ring-a-ring-a-rosies" in Dublin with the third line "A-tishoo, a-tishoo" but later came upon a likely earlier variant "Ashes dashes".

The ring o' rosies was a rash on the skin; the posies were carried either to hide the smell of infection or to ward off the plague (by magic or herbal medicine) -- not always successfully: ashes to ashes, we all fall down.

Myth! Myth!

As opposed to . . . ?

Thir! Thir!




I don't believe that Ring-a-rosies is anything to do with the plague. I believe that "ashes" in the third line is an attempt to make sense of the word "asha" which was intended to represent a sneeze.

Then why do we "all fall down"?

First google result: http://www.famousquotes.me.uk/nursery_rhymes/ring_a_ring_o_rosies.htm

Second: http://www.rooneydesign.com/RingRosies.html

Third: http://www.rhymes.org.uk/ring_around_the_rosy.htm

And isn't it an English rhyme originally, so the Irish "asha" is irrelevant to this aspect of the discussion.

Ooops. Just read some of R'man's links. All sorts of other theories about the "ashes." Nothing to do with the sound of sneezing, but about burning the bodies of plague victims. ( I don't believe that pre-mortal coughing fits would have brought up blackened blood.."ashes"..., because the lungs are full of really fresh blood. e.g. the dying coughs of tubercular victims...bright red!)

It's on the internet; it must be true!

On the other hand,

http://www.snopes.com/language/literary/rosie.htm

My theory is that 'atishoo' in the English version got converted into 'asha' in the Irish version and from there to 'ashes' in the American version, with a bit of wishful thinking.

Oh, and by the way, it is now thought the the Black Death was not bubonic plague at all. It spreads too fast, and there were very few rats in Europe at the time. The most likely possibility is that it was a type of Ebola.

Incidentally, a recent very interesting documentary on the bubonic plague and the Black Death ( considered the origin of the rhyme by many "authorities"...) conluded that the Black Death was not bubonic plague, but an airborne virus like Ebola, because in all the medieval accounts, [many of which survive] there is no mention of dead rats. Yet the British raj experience of bubonic plague in India was that outbreaks of plague were invariably accompanied by unmissable numbers of rats emerging from their holes to die in the open air.

Curiously, the airborne virus would have mainly been transmitted by sneezing!

Ah, Gnomon, you saw it too. Simulpost...snap!

I'm willing to accept the Snopes suggestion, that it referred to a ban on dancing.

However he protests too much; no one should seriously suggest that the rhyme came from the 14th century, but the language could well come from the 17th century, and the rhyme could have passed on in oral culture until written down 170 years later in the 1830s. There are other 17th century rhymes with varying degrees of meaning from the 17th century, such as Jack and Jill (liquid measures, changed by royal decree) and Humpty Dumpty (the head of Charles I).

And children's rhymes travel fast and last ages, ignored by writing adults.

Regarding the persistence of rhymes etc in the oral traditions, one should not wonder that a poem might survive ( even if the language is modified from, say, Middle English to Modern English.) After all, the Vedas are reckoned to have survived for approximately 10,000 years (minimum 5,000 years depending on the authority quoted) in a strictly oral tradition.

More recently, an Irish early 20th century folklorist (FitzGerald, I think) found a west of Ireland shanachie/storyteller who was still reciting Irish epic poetry in exactly the same form as written down in some very early medieval manuscripts. He was able to fill in the sections obviously missing from the damaged MSs.

Don't ask me for details, I'm remembering remarks by a professor during a sleepy lecture in Trinity College thirty-five years ago.

Snopes and Mrs Snopes do not ask that you believe them. They just want you to stop believing everyone else, and to consider the evidence.