Opie & Opie

Further to reference 1, I am still turning the pages of Ong's reference 2 with both pleasure and profit. And this morning I find Opie & Opie of reference 3.

Ong's point is that this compendium contains lots of examples of words which have survived in rhymes which were in common use until fairly recently, but which have long lost their meaning, and have become nonsense words. This in the context of a discussion of the survival of antique words in the epic poetry of oral cultures: they might not have etymological dictionaries in the way of literate cultures, dictionaries like the OED, but at least some of the past lives on in the present.

Turning the book up at the Internet Archive, I quickly find that the whole business of what we call nursery rhymes is far more complicated than at first might appear. I shall delve further, but in the meantime the rhyme about puddings snapped above from chapter 'A' caught my eye.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/03/specialisms.html.

Reference 2: Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word – Walter J. Ong, S.J. – 1982.

Reference 3: The Oxford dictionary of nursery rhymes – Opie, Opie – 1952. More than 500 pages of it.