The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article with the headline, “London’s Best is Falling Down” about the decline in sales of homes in fancy London neighborhoods; a full-page ad in the New York Times featured a clay piggy bank stuffed with dollar bills, with the catchy line, “Guess Where This Little Piggy Went …” – an Ameritel ad for wireless phone bill savings. And a New Yorker cartoon last month had two lambs talking in a field, with one saying, “My self-esteem was so low I just followed her around everywhere she would go.”
Most adults, and even most children, in the English-speaking world would recognize in the headline, ad, and cartoon that each was based on a simple nursery rhyme, respectively: London Bridge is Falling Down; This Little Piggy Went to Market; and Mary Had a Little Lamb.
But those single references are nothing compared to the year Humpty Dumpty has been having: the famously clumsy egg has not only become the poster boy for the economic crisis, he has become an adjective as well, as in “Humpty Dumpty Economics,” a reference that pulls up 62,000 sites on Google and which refers to the policies that have brought the world to its current financial crisis.
But aren’t nursery rhymes for babies? Just what are Humpty Dumpty and company doing in our newspapers and magazines, anyway?
On close inspection, it can be safely said that Americans and the English like their cultural references. These include puns, parodies, and other clever takes on famous lines from classic books (Aesop’s fables, the Bible and Shakespeare, on up to more modern classic novels); movies (from cult to current favorites); and sayings from famous people, contemporary or historical -- all of which run rampant in the headlines of the New York Times, the Economist, and other prominent publications in the United States and England.
The Economist used Aesop’s fable, Tortoise and the Hare, to draw readers to an article about Argentina and Brazil; the New Yorker last month used the same pair on the cover as a metaphor for the continued presidential race.
This past spring, when now ex-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was caught cheating on his wife with a call girl from an agency called The Emperor’s Club, the reference to Hans Christian Anderson’s tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes inspired headlines for the New York Observer and Institutional Investor, as well as another New Yorker cover.
A recent full-page ad in Newsweek and elsewhere,from the company iShares, featured a simple acorn, with the tag line: “Maybe the Sky Isn’t Falling,” with the added message, “Don’t let all the hype and uncertainty distract you from your long-term investment goals.” The ad assumes readers remember the alarmist Chicken Little, who, when an acorn falls on his head in a forest one day, runs off to tell the king that the sky is falling.
Editors, headline writers, advertisers, and cartoonists of the English-speaking world use these references as a way of luring readers to their articles and illustrations. Americans like these cultural references (I’m generalizing broadly here) because they’re catchy, direct, and make a potentially complex subject seem easy; the English, meanwhile (and more generalizing), like cultural references because they appeal to their more literary, verbally playful side.
So, for example, an article about Australian river management in the Economist is titled, “Not so gently down the stream,” a reference to the preschool favorite, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Such a title might actually get a reader to peruse at least the first paragraph, whereas something like “Climate change and drought change boating habits in Australia” would ring up a “Next!” and a quick flick to the next page.
Nursery rhymes are an interesting pick for cultural references, though, because they go back to poems and ditties we learn as preverbal, or barely verbal, babies. The rhymes and characters found in these verses, most of which are between 150 and 400 years old, are silly and old fashioned at best, and then sometimes downright strange and bizarre choices for soothing or entertaining children: (see “Rockabye Baby”). Some rhymes were made up for children, while others are disguised as darker political statements whose meaning has been long forgotten. (Why else would parents continue to sing about a baby falling out of a tree, cradle and all?!) Even so, somehow these early poems stay with us – and explain in shorthand, and with simple humor, what is going on in our world.
But say you are a foreigner – even one quite fluent in English – but nonetheless unfamiliar with Mother Goose (the mythical figure who made up these rhymes). And say you see a New Yorker cover, such as the one from this past February:
There before you is a giant, vaguely grotesque egg dressed in bow tie and suit, a skinny arm raised in despair, while sitting on a wall marked “Stock Exchange.” You get that it is financially related, but why … an egg?
Meanwhile, the English-speaking audience knows the meaning at a glance from four simple lines learned long, long ago:
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.
Humpty Dumpty is an instant, visual metaphor for the recent failure of banks, government lending institutions, and private Wall Street companies -- and the inability of economists and policy-makers to put him back together again.
These days, financial crisis headlines using Humpty Dumpty shorthand range from established business publications to personal blog sites. There is Forbes magazine’s “The Humpty Dumpty Economy” and the Financial Times’ “Humpty-Dumpty legal interpretation by the UK government” (re frozen British assets in Icelandic banks); then there’s “The Coyote’s Byte: A Place for Me to Howl at the Moon” (from Phoenix, AZ): “Humpty Dumpty and Republicans That Make You Go Hmm…”
In any case, by the time we start kindergarten we have already started to forget them; by the time we’re teens and young adults, Humpty Dumpty, Little Bo Peep and the rest of the gang are faded, distant, barely memorable memories. But then – boom: once we become a newspaper-reading adult, the headlines and references to those lost rhymes and characters rise, somewhat hazily, to the surface; and once we become parents ourselves, and crack open the Mother Goose book received as a baby present, the verses are more fully revived, ready to be passed on from one generation to the next.
Just how much longer such rhymes remain a source of cultural and generational unity is something the British currently worry about: “Humpty Dumpty Falls From Favour” (The Times, July 2007), as new parents find these rhymes “irrelevant” and perhaps not as catchy as newer tunes. My own son -- now 17 years old but at one time a big Humpty Dumpty fan – sees little use in repeating these seemingly strange verses. But time has yet to tell if the sky is falling on nursery rhymes as cultural references, or not.
