Not Going to Market
Hyla Levy
Seventeen twenty eight, in case you were wondering. That’s the year the nursery rhyme recounting the mundane events of the lives of these little piggies was introduced. The version most of us are familiar with didn’t take shape until thirty years later, with the publication of The Famous Tommy Thumb’s Little Story-Book. For nearly 250 years we’ve been amusing infants (and ourselves) by tickling their toes and referring them as piggies.
Why piggies? Nobody knows. We can guess — but why should we? If it was good enough for Famous Tommy Thumb, it should be good enough for us. As Mr. Dickens would have put it, the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and our unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for.
It’s really rather comforting, isn’t it, all those centuries of piggie-fondling, and the knowledge that in another 250 years our descendants (assuming we have any, and the planet continues to rotate on its axis) will still be grasping unsuspecting babbies by their wee little toes and going wee wee wee all the way home.
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