Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: the Reason Behind the Rhyme by Chris Roberts. Published by Gotham Books, 2005. 202 pages.

Many of the popular nursery rhymes that we read to our children have their roots in ancient folk rhymes from England. Roberts, a London librarian, has tracked down the likely origins of forty of these rhymes. This was a difficult job because they are so old, they were verbal rather than written stories for so long, they contain slang terms we don’t understand today, and they have frequently been repurposed or "cleaned up" over the intervening centuries.

The author is frequently sidetracked into commenting on current politics or culture but he manages to give the reader quite a bit of English history as we find out Humpty Dumpty was a cannon, the Three Blind Mice were blind Protestants burned at the stake for owning English language Bibles, and Tweedledum and Tweedledee first appeared in a feud between the musical composers Handel and Bononcini in 1725.

It is fascinating to see how this genre has mutated and been used differently over the centuries and I guarantee that, if you read this book, you will think twice about every nursery rhyme you read to children in the future.

Bob Sibert