People,
Can someone explain the inexplicable children’s ditty about our toes? You know:
This little piggy went to market;
This little piggy stayed home;
This little piggy had roast beef;
This little piggy had none;
And THIS little piggy went wee, wee, wee;
all the way home
Why my toes are eating better than I am, I’m unsure.
-Birdmonster
according to this site there is no known explanation as to the origin. Damn that’s unsatisfying.
It sounds like standard high-quality nonsense, to me. Things like that make children shriek with delight. My favorite piece of nonsense was about the bears in Siberia; they have such large behinds because they grow on trees and when they’re ripe, they plop! fall into the snow and land on their behinds. And then they get up and waddle away, and that’s called a Siberian rabbit.
???
Tell me about it. Someone was telling me it was of Mother Gooseian origins, but I doubted it, as those always seem a little more sequitor (just barely) and supposedly are based on historical events. At least some scholars insist they are.
My son has already pointed this out to me, when he was barely two years old. I was doing the piggy thing and looked at me disapprovingly and said, “Daddy, those aren’t piggies. Those are my toes!”
That spawned a new tradition in the Bricker household: the story starts out now every time with a brief Q&A:
Me: “What are these?”
Him: “My toes!”
Me: “Yes. But in this story, they are pretending to be…?”
Him: “The PIGGIES!”
Much laughter then ensues.
When my middle boy was two, he hated being left out of anything and especially hated being left behind. So all of the piggies had to go to market. None of them could be abandoned at home.
This little piggie went to market
This little piggie went to the market, too
This little piggie had roast beef at the market
This little piggie had none at the market
And this little piggie cried whee, whee, whee allllll the way to the market.
I guess you had to have been there.
Lilly, Queen of the Universe, was visiting my family’s farm when she was small.
She asked my father, “Bobo, where do the cows sleep?”
Bobo (her word for grandfather): “They sleep in the barn, sweetheart.”
Lilly: “OK. So where’s the shoe?”
Bobo (with quizzical look on his face): “Uhhh, what shoe would that be?”
Lilly: “The one where the piggies sleep.”
Kind of hard to argue with the logic of it.
It’s about pig farming.
This little piggy went to market.
The pig didn’t go shopping, this line refers to the pig itself being sold.
This little piggy stayed home.
The farmer kept this pig, probably for breeding stock.
This little piggy had roast beef.
Pigs are omnivorous and it was/is common to feed them table scraps and garbage when “slopping” them.
This little piggy had none.
This pig is about to be slaughtered. Just before slaughter one either doesn’t feed the animal or may instead feed it something like a lot of over-ripe fruit. Either way, the goal is to minimize the amount of material in the gut and bowels.
and this little piggy went wee, wee, wee all the way home.
This is an error in transcription. It should be “oui” not “wee.” This whole rhyme is about French pig farming and this last pig is shouting his exultation at not meeting the fates of pigs 1 and 4.
interesting… any thoughts on how it got connected with itty bitty toes? 
Just conjecture, but in a largely non-literate agrarian society, perhaps Gallic pig farmers had it as an oral tradition to teach their children how to run the family hog farm.
I thought it was just an excuse to tickle your kid’s tootsies.
A tale of two pigs
The first pig was taken to market, while the second wasn’t
The first pig was given food to make it fat, the second wasn’t
The first pig then cried as it was slaughtered.
So don’t complain if your big brother gets more food than you, or goes out to play when you stay in. Which piggy would you rather be?
The problem is, you got ten toes but only five lines of verse to tug them with. My daughter demanded all toes be tugged, and thus did come a second verse:
This little piggy got made into bacon.
This little piggy got made into ham.
This little piggy got made into chitlins.
This little piggy got made into spam.
And this little piggy got made into Dodger dogs,
and went wee, wee, wee…all the way to the ballpark.
Kid still won’t eat a pork chop.
My kid’s weirder. His favorite food (next to cereal, anyway) is chicken, and he demands chicken all the time. Yet his favorite nightly ritual is hearing bedtime stories about “the little red chicken” and his friends, the little blue chicken, the little yellow chicken, etc.
And if the story requires them to eat anything, they’ll gladly much on – you guessed it – chicken.
*“As far as Death was aware, the sole reason for any human association with pigs and lambs was as a prelude to chops and sausages. Quite why they should dress up for children’s wallpaper as well was a mystery. Hello, little folk, this is what you’re going to eat…”
–Terry Pratchett, * Hogfather
According to The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes by Peter and Iona Opie, it does indeed first appear around 1728, published in a 1740 book. The Opie’s call it “…the most common toe or finger rhyme in the present day.”
Different versions over centuries have give different verses. In one early version, it was “roast Meat.” And "This Pig went to the Barn Door, and cry’d Week, Week, for more’ " “This little Pig had bread and butter” “This little pig said, Me a bit, me a bit, me a bit, before it all be gone.”
The Opie’s list this rhyme with many others from the time listed as “Infant amusement.” They were certainly rhymes for playing with the small fry.
In Chinese the toes are little cows and ends:
And this little cow was napping so we beat him.
…so the piggie didn’t eat rare roast beef, then?