Lost in Translation

Hello all. In explanation of this post, we here at Pluckytown have started a new program in which we have three themed weeks a month, and each one of the main contributors here gets to pick a theme for their week. This week's theme, brought to you by Kamp, is the "Longevity of Music." Now it's up to the other two of us to write something in line with that guidepost. Of all the things for me to focus on, I have chosen to take a look at nursery rhymes. Well, nursery rhyme, in this case, since all I'm going to be talking about is Little Boy Blue. This has a tune, so it qualifies as music. Onward.

Nursery Rhymes have seemingly been around forever. If you think about how they have existed, it makes sense. We were taught them as children by our parents, who in turn were taught them as children by their parents, and so on and so forth. They had to originate somewhere, and my guess is that most of them came somewhere out of the Middle Ages or 1800s. As usual, I have no research to support this. As usual, this piece is so ridiculous, it doesn't matter.

If we assume that the average nursery rhyme is more than 5 score old, then we can infer that some of the meaning of the original quip has been lost as language has evolved and been refined. This is where Little Boy Blue comes in. I'm sure that at some point, the moral of the story had something to do with working hard and not being lazy, but I have a hard time seeing that now. Here's the lyrics for those of you who are memorically challenged:

Little Boy Blue come blow your horn,
The sheep's in the meadow,
The cow's in the corn.
Where is the boy who looks after the sheep?
He's under the haystack,
Fast asleep.

Let's break this down from top to bottom.

Little Boy Blue come blow your horn,
The sheep's in the meadow,
The cows in the corn.

As one who has a little bit of experience in this department, let me enlighten you a bit on why this doesn't make sense to me. I spent part of my formative years on a hobby farm in eastern North Dakota. We did not plant, grow, and harvest crops, but we dabbled in livestock, including, but not limited to, sheep and chickens. Sheep especially do not like loud, sudden noises. If you don't want to take my word for it, spend some time trying to track down comedian Ken Davis' story about Herman the Sheep. It's time well spent.

Now, if we read farther down into the rhyme, we are told that the sheep are in the meadow, and the cows are in the corn. I am assuming that these are places the animals should not be, otherwise notifying the caretaker of said animals would be completely unnecessary.

So, I guess my point here is that a sudden blast on a trumpet probably isn't going to have the desired outcome of rounding up the animals. It seems like a case of the manager not really having any idea of what his employee's job really entails, or how he should go about doing it. Seems to me a common occurrence today.

Where is the boy who looks after the sheep?
He's under the haystack,
Fast asleep.

Once again, I will draw from my farm experience on this one. I can tell you that if you can see part of Little Boy Blue under a haystack, and he's motionless, he's not sleeping. He's dead. I used to have to stack bales of hay on the farm. These are roughly 3 ft long, by 2 ft wide, by 2 ft high, or so. It's been a while. And I'd estimate each one weighs in the neighborhood of 30-45 lbs. Now a haystack probably can generate more than a few of these bales. We're talking multiple hundreds of pounds here. To have ended up underneath a haystack, Little Boy Blue is either the victim of a terrible accident, or an horrific murder.

So, in summation, we have a case of an employee being ordered to do a task that doesn't make any sense whatsoever, and he couldn't complete it anyway, cause he's dead.

And we teach our children this stuff.