[Ads-l] a little more on ejaculatory pop, etc.

[Robin Hamilton]

An Hypothetical Reconstruction of a Three-Stanza version of “Pop goes the
weasel”.

1. The Rice:

Half a pound of tuppenny rice,
Half a pound of treacle,
Mix it up and make it nice,
Pop goes the weasel!

2. The Pub

Up and down the City Road
In and out of the Eagle,
That's the way the money goes,
Pop goes the weasel!

3. The Monkey

Every night when I get home
The monkey's on the table;
Take a stick and knock it off,
Pop goes the weasel!

NOTES:

The above could perhaps be described as an tentative core text.

Stanza 1: Possibly the earliest extension, with the third line originally
reading, “That's the way the money goes”. When the Rice and the Pub stanzas were
brought together, to avoid repetition the original third line in the above
quatrain --  "That's the way the money goes" -- was replaced by, “Mix it up and
make it nice.”

Stanza 2: Probably originally a free-standing extension of the original
catchphrase, later combined with Stanza 1.

Stanza 3: The monkey is added later still, and possibly first appears in
America.  Line 1 in that stanza may end either with “get home” [from the Eagle,
if the stanza occurs by itself] or “go out” [to the Eagle, which is the
Necessary Variant when the three stanzas put together in sequence].

Why no documentation to the above on my part? Well, the Opies in _The Singing
Game_ print the Rice and Monkey stanzas (but not the Pub stanza), but with no
source citations. A poster in the Mudcat forum
[http://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=3183] gives the three stanzas
more-or-less as I provide them above, citing _Denslow's Mother Goose_ (1901),
but curse me if I can find them there
[https://www.gutenberg.org/files/18546/18546-h/18546-h.htm].

Who am I supposed to believe, the Mudcat poster or my lying eyes?

Anyway, I proffer the above, for what it’s worth, as a possible starting point
for an exploration of the textual development of the catchphrase, “Pop goes the
weasel”.

Robin Hamilton, a.k.a. Frustrated In Darlington

> 
>     On 14 March 2017 at 22:41 "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
> 
> 
>     on my blog:
> 
>     https://arnoldzwicky.org/2017/03/14/pop-ejaculated-the-weasel/
> 
>     (now you guys should get together and turn the new stuff into a journal
> article.
> 
>     arnold
> 
>     ------------------------------------------------------------
>     The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org