Ring around the rosey

Nursery rhymes are just creepy. Sometimes creepier than the average person knows. Take this one:

Ring around the rosey
Pocket full of posey
Husha hush (alternatives include Ashes Ashes and A-tchoo A-tchoo)
We all fall down

I play this game with my little girl - we sing this song and walk in a circle and fall down when we hit the end and giggle. She'd do it all day long if i let her. Lots of kids do this.

What they don't know is that this is in direct reference to the black Plague. Perhaps you've hear of it? Wiped out like 2/3 of Europe back in the day. Not that it was necessarily a bad thing as a whole (see below) but i'm sure the people who died from it wouldn't have warm and squishy feelings about us singing it as a nursery rhyme.

The "ring around the rosey" refers the one of the first symptoms, which is a lymph node that gets infected and swells up and, you guessed it, forms a nice ring around the rosy pissed off flesh.

Pocket full of posey refers to the fact that people carried flowers that were supposed to protect them because they thought that the disease was carried by the bad smell. God we were (and probably are still) a stupid stupid race.

Husha husha refers to the lungs shutting down, which you know, generally leads to death, and also was the main reason most of these people died (well, for some versions of the plague. Not worth getting to specific, just trust me on this). Ashes Ashes could refer to the fact that the only thing they could do was burn the corpse's and hope. A-tchoo works also as sneezing was another symptom as well.

And we all fall down = Europe dieing.

Makes it that much more creepy.

I'll go into why it wasn't really a bad thing some other time.