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Humpty Dumpty is a character in a Nursery Rhyme portrayed as an Anthropomorphic Egg . Most English -speaking children are familiar with the rhyme: 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. The fact that Humpty Dumpty is an egg is not actually stated in the rhyme. In its first printed form, in 1810, it is a Riddle , and exploits for Misdirection the fact that "humpty dumpty" was 18th-Century Reduplicative slang for a short, clumsy person. Whereas a clumsy person falling off a wall would not be irreparably damaged, 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 Folklorist s in other languages, such as ''Boule Boule'' in French , or ''Lille Trille'' in Swedish & Norwegian ; though none is as widely known as Humpty Dumpty is in English. ORIGINS Previous to the "short, clumsy person" meaning, "humpty dumpty" referred to a drink of Brandy boiled with Ale . There are also various theories of an original "Humpty Dumpty", who was not an egg. Most, if not all, of these must be classified as False Etymologies .
:Visitors to Colchester can see the reconstructed Church tower as they reach the top of Balkerne Hill on the left hand side of the road. An extended version of the rhyme gives additional verses, including the following: ::''In Sixteen Hundred and Forty-Eight'' ::''When England suffered the pains of state'' ::''The Roundheads lay siege to Colchester town'' ::''Where the King's men still fought for the crown'' ::''There One-Eyed Thompson stood on the wall'' ::''A gunner of deadliest aim of all'' ::''From St. Mary's Tower his cannon he fired'' ::''Humpty-Dumpty was its name...''
REFERENCES IN POPULAR CULTURE ''. Illustration by John Tenniel .]] with answer, in a 1902 Mother Goose story book by William Wallace Denslow ]] shows the result of the fall]] Humpty appears in Lewis Carroll 's '' Through The Looking-Glass '', where he discusses Semantics and Pragmatics with Alice .
Among other things, he (mis-)explains the difficult words from Jabberwocky . ''See Humpty Dumptyism .'' Throughout James Joyce 's '' Finnegans Wake '', the male protagonist, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, is compared to Humpty Dumpty. One of many exegeses is that his subconscious, which he "breaks open" every night as he sleeps, contains all the fragments of history, which his wife collects and puts back together again in the morning (unlike the rhyme). Joyce explicitly refers to Humphrey as Humpty on page 12, line 12 of the ''Wake''. "All The King's Men" is used as the title of Robert Penn Warnen's 1946 novel, depicting the events in the dramatic political rise and fall of Willie Stark, a populist southern governor in the American during the 1930s. In L. Frank Baum 's '' Mother Goose In Prose '', the rhyming riddle is devised by the daughter of the King, having witnessed Humpty's "death" and her father's soldiers' efforts to save him. Tori Amos wrote a song named Humpty Dumpty which uses the poem as lyrics. Batman features a character based on Humpty Dumpty - most likely out of its tendency to base ideas on fairy tales and Alice and Wonderland(such as the Mad Hatter). He enjoys taking things apart to see if he can put them back together again and make them better - and was thus mislabeled as a terrorist. Counting Crows have a song called "Einstein on the Beach (For An Eggman)" in which the chorus references Humpty-Dumpty: "And all the king's men reappear / For an eggman, on and off the wall / Who'll never be together again..." A re-telling of the rhyme appeared in the TV show Lost In Space in the episode "Rocket To Earth". Dr. Smith is convinced he is seeing things. The Robot attempts to cheer him up by reciting the following: ::Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall ::Humpty Dumpty was two inches tall ::He fell down and broke his shell ::Poor little egg, I wish him well. To which Smith responds: "I think I'm going to be violently ill". The title of Robert Penn Warren 's novel '' All The King's Men '' derives from the nursery rhyme, as does the title of Woodward and Bernstein 's Watergate memoir '' All The President's Men ''. ''All the King's Men'' is also the title of a children's opera by Richard Rodney Bennett . Set in the time of the English Civil War it describes the invention of a machine similar to the Roman Testudo (see below) which the troops on both sides in the Gloucester siege christened "Humpty-Dumpty". Also, Aimee Mann wrote a song named "Humpty Dumpty", in which the last verses are a romantic adaptation of the original poem ("All the king horses and all the kings men/ Couldn't put baby together again"). Neil Gaiman published in '' Knave '', in 1984 a short story called 'The Case of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds', which casts Humpty as a murder victim. The tone is that of hard boiled Detective Fiction and casts a number of Nursery Rhyme characters in various roles such as Jill from Jack And Jill as the Femme Fatale or Cock Robin as the underworld informant. It is now available to read from his website . Jasper Fforde includes Humpty Dumpty in two of his novels. One, '' The Well Of Lost Plots '', the third novel in his Thursday Next series, features Humpty as the ringleader of dissatisfied nursery rhyme characters threatening to strike. The other, '' The Big Over Easy '' sets Humpty as the victim of a murder under investigation by Detective Inspector Jack Spratt and his partner Detective Sergeant Mary Mary. Robert Rankin includes Humpty Dumpty as one victim of a serial fairy tale character murderer investigated by Bill Winkie, Private Eye and sidekick Eddie Bear the Teddy Bear, in his novel " The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies Of The Apocalypse " Humpty makes a cameo in '' American McGee's Alice '', where he is half-broken and smoking a Cigar . His role in the game is to point Alice to the location of the Blunderbuss . In Todd McFarlane's 'Twisted Fairy Tales' line, Humpty Dumpty is not an egg, but a huge fat creature wearing a propellor beanie, with entrails leaking from his body and stitches and staples to 'fix' him. Frank Beddor said in an interview that Humpty Dumpty will probably be in his third '' Looking Glass Wars '' book. Humpty Dumpty also appears in James Joyce 's '' Finnegans Wake '' as a symbol of the fall of all men. There is also a song by Travis (Scottish band) which is called "The Humpty Dumpty Love Song". The first lines of it are "All of the king's horses and all of the king's men couldn't put my heart back together again".Taken from their third studio album The Invisible Band (2001) There is another Travis Song called "Coming Around". In the video, there is the singer Fran Healy in an egg and by the end of it he falls from a wall. In Fantasy Flight Games Grimm RPG of twisted fairy tales he features as Humpty Dumpty aka. "The Rotten King". A smelly ruler over an evil kingdom of monsters who enjoys nothing more than pitting children against each other in cruel games. The Prog rock band Genesis has a song named Squonk, from their 1976 album '' A Trick Of The Tail '', which features the line "All the king's horses and all the king's men could never put a smile on that face". Humpty Dumpty features prominently in '' City Of Glass '' by Paul Auster . The character Peter Stillman, while cracking open a boiled egg, uses the example of Humpty Dumpty to explain his theories about language. ''Eggorny'' is a Colombia n cartoon, which is about Humpty Dumpty. It takes place in a mediæval landscape. After his great fall, no one was able to put Humpty together again until some 1500 years later. A teenager named Rufus put him together again, and renamed him Eggorny. Eggorny now lives in the modern-day town of Someville. The British Jazz-funk group Central Line name-checked Humpty Dumpty in their 1981 club hit "You Know You Can Do It" ("Not like Humpty / Don't come tumbling down / Into pieces on the ground") 60's rock band The Monkees has a song called "All The King's Horses" with the chorus singing "All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put my broken heart back together again." Humpty Dumpty is also a minor character in the first story arc of the comic book '' Jack Of Fables '', in which he remembers the Battle at Colchester, and actually fires as a cannon once before cracking up. On November 6th, 2006, NPR 's All Things Considered used the nursery rhyme to demonstrate the talents of voice-over artists Dennis Steele and Scott Sander. Their voices are both recognizeable as narrators for political season TV advertisements. In a "Dire and Disastrous" tone the rhyme was lampooned as, "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All our Federal Tax Dollars could not put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Humpty Dumpty...Wrong on wall-sitting." Ricky Gervais , comedian and producer of both the British and American versions of the television show " The Office ", Rant ed about Humpty Dumpty in his stage show, "Politics." Boston-based band The Receiving End Of Sirens uses the lyrics "Bring all the king's horses and all the king's men" in their song "The War of All Against All". Olivier Blanchard and Michael Kremer close their 1997 paper in the Quarterly Journal Of Economics entitled "Disorganization" with a phrase from the rhyme. In Cardcaptor Sakura Tomoyo is Humpty Dumpty during Sakura's trip into "Alice in wonderland". Toast Soldiers that are dipped in soft boiled eggs are believed to have been given the name from the rhyme. APPLICATION IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE A phonetic variation composed of near-sounding French words of the rhyme is also used in the fields of Systems Analysis , Knowledge Management , and requirements management in Software Development to illustrate the complexity of human communications. It is useful in bilingual or near-bilingual environments to show the issues involved in crossing over from the oral world typical of implicit knowledge to the written world of explicit knowledge. One of the many variations is thus: Homme petit d'homme petit, s'attend, n'avale Homme petit d'homme petit, à degrés de bègues folles Anal deux qui noeuds ours, anal deux qui noeuds s'y mènent Coup d'un poux tome petit tout guetteur à gaine If this is read out slowly (by somebody who has a good enough knowledge of French to pronounce it properly, but has not been told a nursery rhyme is involved) to an audience of persons who have been warned a nursery rhyme is involved, the reader would be rather bemused and the listeners would very rapidly recognize the nursery rhyme. Reading the passage aloud will make the effect clear. A literal translation of the French words (by somebody with a good knowledge of French, and a moderate knowledge of English but no knowledge of the nursery rhyme) would come out thus: Little man of little man, waits for himself, does not swallow Little man of little man, by degrees of stuttering madwomen Anal two that knots bears, anal two that leads Strike from a louse small volume any watchman with a fish See Also: Mondegreen Animutation EXTERNAL LINKS
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