So we all know the nursery rhyme “Humpty Dumpty”. But what we don’t seem to know is whether he was truly an egg. The pictures and books all show a well dressed and likely hard boiled egg, wearing one of those old timey man blouses, trousers and boots and suspenders. What size pants does an egg wear? Where did the legs come from? What compelled this bulbous egg-human hybrid to sit on a wall, and why did he think it would go well? Don’t even get me started on all the kings horses and all the kings men- how on earth could a hooved animal put a broken egg back together? This begs the question, was he alive while splattered across the cobblestone? What happened when they figured out he couldn’t be fixed, how do you measure a casket for a human sized egg?
That’s all for this thought train, time to get off.
And now for some Humpty Dumpty facts, from our ever-trusted source Wikipedia.
“ According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the 17th century the term "humpty dumpty" referred to a drink of brandy boiled with ale.[4] The riddle probably exploited, for misdirection, the fact that "humpty dumpty" was also eighteenth-century reduplicative slang for a short and clumsy person.[11]The riddle may depend upon the assumption that a clumsy person falling off a wall might not be irreparably damaged, whereas an egg would be. The rhyme is no longer posed as a riddle, since the answer is now so well known. Similar riddles have been recorded by folklorists in other languages, such as "Boule Boule" in French, "Lille Trille" in Swedish and Norwegian, and "Runtzelken-Puntzelken" or "Humpelken-Pumpelken" in different parts of Germany—although none is as widely known as Humpty Dumpty is in English.[4][12]”
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