What does Piggy went to the market mean to you?
0 voters
This little piggy went to the market,
This little piggy stayed home,
This little piggy had roast beef,
This little piggy had none,
And this little piggy cried wee wee wee all the way home.
I hate to admit that I thought Piggy had a great time shopping at the market.
The other meaning didn’t occur to me until college. I had a course that covered the dark history of many Nursery Rhymes and stories.
Hansel and Gretel. Is very dark.
I voted for “Piggy went shopping” because that’s what I thought my whole life until I learned otherwise here. I always felt bad for the piggy that had none. Now I know my sympathy was misplaced.
It is a fun story to tell children. I would never ruin it for the kids by mentioning the darker meaning.
“If the train should jump the track, do you want your money back?”
Ummm, yeah, just add it to my estate.
Frankly, we’ve always used “went shopping” when playing that nursery rhyme game with our children and now grandchildren. It scans just as well and has no ambiguity. (Americans idiomatically don’t “go to market”.)
I want to know who is feeding their pigs roast beef.
Pigs get fed all kinds of scraps. I’m sure there are farmers who’ve really fed their pigs roast beef rather than just throw it away.
This is what they’re feasting on in Ukraine these days:
Went shopping. I don’t know what the “original intent” was but, last time this came up, I found picture books and illustrated versions of the poem with the pigs going shopping dating at least as far back at the mid 1800s. So I figure 150+ years of pigs buying groceries is good enough to call it a valid popular interpretation.
Same here, when I was a kid the books we had that had this nursery rhyme showed a pig going shopping.
A pig trussed up with an apple in its mouth would have been kind of cool though.
Old illustrated books are a good source for how people understood the material.
Maybe going to market did mean shopping .
I dismiss the idea that the first line means that the pig was butchered. The other lines suggest that they’re five little piggies doing mostly human-type stuff.
Though line three, I believe, was originally roast meat, so…
For line one, I picture a bipedal pig with a pocketbook and a yellow dress walking down the street to the market. The image may have come from a picturebook.
Totally agree. Shopping, not butchered:
Me too. Probably influenced my vote.
And I go to market now with some regularity; though I’m selling at a farmers’ market, and would probably say ‘going shopping’ if I were just going to the store(s). I think the phrase probably came from times when people went to their village on market day, on which various people brought their wares to market. We’re used to 24/7 supermarkets now; but in a lot of places people didn’t use to shop every day, or just whatever day pleased them.
As far as I can tell, the whole “they’re being butchered” thing came out of nowhere. Just one of those made up “did you know” facts that get shared on social media.
A duck’s quack never echoes.
Nobody knows why.
That was my first reaction as well (see: “Ring Around the Rosie”).
I think the mystery can be unraveled by analyzing the 5th line of the first recorded version of the rhyme in 1728 [according to wiki]:
This pig went to market,
That pig stayed home;
This pig had roast meat,
That pig had none;
This pig went to the barn’s door,
And cried week, week for more.
This pig went to the barn’s door. What the heck does that mean? Going to the barn’s door doesn’t appear to be a saying of some sort. But, it does make the nursery rhyme sound more ominous. So, my vote is for “pork chops.”
Reads to me that the pig went to the door of the barn and cried for more food.
Anybody who’s around a farm at feeding time would hear animals in or around the barn calling to be fed. If they’re not penned in a particular stall, but loose in the barn, they might well be calling at the barn door; and if they’re outside but their food’s stored in the barn and brought out from there, again they’d call at the barn door. Doesn’t sound ominous to me.
“Week, week” might be an imitation of one of the noises a young pig might make.