Re: NETUSER - Totally Useless Facts
PhantomOSX said:
The nursery rhyme Ring Around the Rosy is a rhyme about the plague. Infected people with the plague would get red circular sores ("Ring around the rosy..."), these sores would smell very badly so common folks would put flowers on their bodies somewhere (inconspicuously), so that it would cover the smell of the sores ("...a pocket full of posies..."), People who died from the plague would be burned so as to reduce the possible spread of the disease ("...ashes, ashes, we all fall down!")
This useless fact is in fact useless fiction.
The biggest problem is the rhyme has been misquoted.
ring around the roses, (or as I learned it ring a ring of roses)
is indeed from the circular sores plague vitims got.
A pocket full of poses,
Flowers were not put on the dead, there is no masking the smell of the dead, instead people wore pockets of flowers (posies) pressed against their face in the style of a surgical mask (look at art and etching from the time (you'll see). -or even read the diary of Samual peppes
ashes ashes, (this line is completly wrong), the true line from the song is atisuue atissue (as in sneezing), this is because a smpton of the bubonic plague is sneezing,
Certainly the bodies of the dead were not burned. as they believed that the ashes would further spread the disease,
in fact the bodies of the dead were buried extra deep, this is where the regulatory 6feet under comes from, before there was no regulated depth for graves and bodies could be buried in shallow graves, since the times of the plague it has been law that a body must be buried 6 feet down.