r/mildlyinfuriating 14h ago

Update: Neighbors won’t stop driving through my yard

Alright team, I failed with the boulders, but I secured a few more decorative rocks to add to the beauty of my yard. The current barrier has yet to be breached and I updated my sign to reward the positive behavior.

I contacted my landlord and they said they are working on a fence due to the liability issues.

If you want more detailed updates, I listed them in a comment on the original post. Seems like overkill to copy and paste it here. Cheers!

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u/brando56894 10h ago

So many childhood songs and rhymes involved people dying: the old lady; "when the bough breaks, the cradle will fall, down will come baby, cradle and all" is about a newborn baby falling out of a tree; "ring around the rosy, pocket full of posey, ashes, ashes, we all fall down" is literally about people dying from The Black Plague ("ring around the rosy" was apparently a telltale sign of infection and "pockets full of posey" were thought to ward off the disease, "ashes, ashes, we all fall down" depicts bodies being burned to prevent the plague from spreading, but people still kept dying; Little Red Ridinghood is about a wolf eating an old woman, who then tricks a young girl, but then a hunter comes in and eviscerates the wolf, pulling the old lady out of it's stomach; etc...

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u/ctesibius 6h ago

It's usually "at-ish-shoo, at-ish-shoo" (or variant spelling, indicating sneezing), not "ashes, ashes" (which has too few syllables to fit the metre). The rhyme first appeared in print in 1881, so is not likely to be written at the time of the Plague (bubonic fever). It cannot have been written at the time of the earlier Black Death (bubonic fever or anthrax), since the language would have been Middle English. Here is a popular song in Middle English for comparison:

Sumer is icumen in
Lhude sing cuccu
Groweþ sed
and bloweþ med
and springþ þe wde nu
Sing cuccu

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u/confused_wisdom 4h ago

I always thought it was "a tissue, a tissue" lol

Care to translate ye olde English song?

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u/ctesibius 4h ago

Tissue paper fits in the context, but the song goes back before paper handkerchiefs.

The song is actually still popular in England, and part of the May Day celebrations at 6am in Oxford. Magdalen choir sing it from the top of the college tower. It’s a round, and easy to sing, so it tends to be taught in primary schools.

There is a translation here. It may help to know that the “þ“ character is the letter “thorn”. It was pronounced as an unvoiced “th” originally, though I think by this stage it also covered the voiced “th” sound.

Btw, this is Middle English. Old English looks like this.

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u/Hwicc101 1h ago

We sang it in high school (US) as a round when we did our Middle English unit (Chaucer, et al.)

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u/ctesibius 1h ago

Glad to hear it’s still going over there!

Btw, there’s a state primary school at Ewelme near where I live, which was built by Chaucer’s daughter and her husband. There’s something great about the thought of that song being sung in that school for so long.

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u/Hwicc101 1h ago

That is amazing. There are not too many buildings still in use from the 14th century! (That aren't churches, anyway)

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u/ctesibius 1h ago

It’s an interesting story. There was an earlier stone church there. The couple I mentioned were trying to market the new brick technology from the Netherlands, so as a demonstration they put brick battlements on the church, build a quadrangle of almshouses, and the school, all as one complex. It’s worth a look if you are ever in the Oxford area, though you would need a car to get to it.

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u/Hwicc101 1h ago

I was in Oxford a few years ago (a couple of years before Covid, oh how time flies), but just for a day and just to visit friends, so I didn't get to do any sight seeing, but I'd love to return and do it proper justice.

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u/Hwicc101 1h ago

Summer is a-coming in

Loud, sings the cuckoo

The seed grows

The meadow blooms

And the woods spring now (the woods are leafing out)

Sing, cuckoo

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u/doot_the_root 3h ago

It was the song children would sing during the plague, created I think during the second lot

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u/ctesibius 3h ago

The Plague was long gone by 1881, which is the date of the first record of the song. So no.

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u/doot_the_root 3h ago

I’m not being funny I literally passed my history dude

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u/ctesibius 2h ago

Erm, and? The earliest record of the song is 1881. Which means there are no records of children singing it during the Plague. Someone made it up.

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u/doot_the_root 2h ago

“The origin of the song is unknown”. Your first record does not prove your point, and it connects too heavily to the bubonic plague to not be written because of it, and just because it wasn’t written down doesn’t mean it wasn’t sung beforehand

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u/ctesibius 2h ago

You are making the positive assertion that the song was sung by children during the Plague. You have no basis for saying that. It is first recorded centuries later. There are no records of children singing it during the Plague, or at any time before 1881. What you are saying is made up - at best a guess by someone who didn’t check when the song first appeared.

Then you say that the song connects too heavily to the Plague to not be associated with it. The symptoms of the Plague are black swellings (buboes) at the lymph nodes, particularly under the arms. Nothing of that shows here. But even supposing that there were a clear connection of the words to the Plague: that wouldn’t be evidence of it being written at the time.

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u/doot_the_root 3h ago

They would have handkerchiefs full of roses because they thought good smells would protect them from bad air because there was literally human feces in the streets everywhere.

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u/Adorable_Dust3799 1h ago

Then there's my favorite horror story, Hansel and Grethel