Talk:The Farmer in the Dell

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Children's literature, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Children's literature on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Children's literatureWikipedia:WikiProject Children's literatureTemplate:WikiProject Children's literaturechildren and young adult literature articles

Low

This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Tasks you can do:

Here are some open tasks for WikiProject Children's literature, an attempt to create and standardize articles related to children's literature. Feel free to help with any of the following tasks.

Add {{Portal|Children's literature}} to the See also section of related articles.
Tag the talk pages of related articles with {{WikiProject Children's literature}}
Join WikiProject Children's literature and list yourself as a Participant in the project.
Cleanup: A cleanup listing for this project is available. See also the list by category, the tool's wiki page and the index of WikiProjects.
Deletion discussions: listed at Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Literature
Notability: Articles with notability concerns, listed at WikiProject Notability
Rate the Unassessed articles in the Children's literature WikiProject.
References: Add references to Unreferenced BLPs.
Requested articles: Create a requested article on literature
Stubs: Improve a stub-class article

edit

Songs

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Songs, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of songs on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.SongsWikipedia:WikiProject SongsTemplate:WikiProject Songssong articles

Poetry

	Poetry portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Poetry, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of poetry on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.PoetryWikipedia:WikiProject PoetryTemplate:WikiProject PoetryPoetry articles
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

Germany Mid‑importance

	Germany portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Germany, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Germany on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.GermanyWikipedia:WikiProject GermanyTemplate:WikiProject GermanyGermany articles
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Why

Why does the cow take the dog? What is a cow going to do with a dog? The rest of the choices make sense, but this one baffles me.

What is the dell?

I would also like to know what is the dell?

It appears to already be on Wikipedia: Dell (landform) Mscudder 22:43, 7 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

If the cheese is taken by the rat, how can it be standing alone? --Nuffle 15:01, 15 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The article's description does not match my single experience as a 5-year-old in 1957. After each child took an additional child in, the taking child exited the middle and rejoined the circle, so the circle always remained. Then the cheese is alone in the middle (with no one lower in the hierarchy to take). The present description implies that you can have 8 children "inside" a "circle" of 1 or 2 children, which seems an unlikely way to do it. (And, as you said, the cheese isn't alone, unless they leave the cheese out as a circle of one and there happens to be exactly the right number of children.) --DanwWiki2 (talk) 17:58, 10 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

What is the significance of the cheese standing alone? Does it have any kind of meaning? I hadn't thought about this song in years, but I just started singing "The cheese stands alone" in my head and it's bothering me! Jhayes94 23:21, 29 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Why? Missing verses! After the rat takes the cheese (with all of those characters in the middle of the circle), the next verse is "the Farmer runs away" (leaves the center of the circle, and breaks through the circle to stand outside it), followed by "the wife runs away", "the child runs away", and so on. Note that with the exception of the farmer, all of the characters were TAKEN in, so no self-locomotion needed to be assumed. The cheese, having no legs, cannot "run away"; therefore, it "stands alone". 194.106.43.222 (talk) 09:09, 3 October 2009 (UTC)When I played this game as a child in Lanarkshire, Scotland in the 1950s we sang 'Hey Ho my Daddy-o' in place of 'Ee, I, addio'(Jim Scott).[reply]

Circle Game Plagarism?

The circle game paragraph appears to be from: http://www.niehs.nih.gov/kids/lyrics/farmer.htm. I think it should be deleted, or at least cited properly. --BekiB 20:28, 20 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Quite Enough Vandalism, Please.

Please stop vandalizing this page. It is not really that funny and other people will have to clean up after your mess. Thanks. 69.61.203.194 (talk) 19:45, 11 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Dell or Dale

Why is the title "Farmer in the Dell", while throughout the article it's "in the Dale"? On Google hits, "Farmer in the Dell" beats "Farmer in the Dale" by about 350:1 Rojomoke (talk) 08:44, 14 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Surely the line should be, “The farmer’s in the dell” with the “is”, rather than the less appropriate, “The farmer in the dell”? It also should be noted that the traditional British version seems to be “the farmer’s in his den”… Jock123 (talk) 18:54, 23 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Nah. There's no need for it to be a sentence and it's misleading if it's emended to one. The farmer in the dell is talking about a farmer whose home and presumably farm are located in the dell. The farmer's in the dell is talking about some moment in time when the farmer is unusually in the dell, which seems to be an entirely incorrect way to parse the current form of the song. — LlywelynII 04:26, 8 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Pop Culture

This was also referenced in the first episode of the 3rd season of The Big Bang Theory. 24.176.137.124 (talk) 20:58, 29 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

and in the wire, first season, episode 5--91.97.80.218 (talk) 12:54, 30 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Just heard this on television

On Saturday morning, December 5, 2009 on the Turner Classic Movie Channel (TCM), the last few minutes of a showing had children in the middle of the street in New York singing this song, dancing in a circle around one child. I was taken aback because I thought I heard the children singing "The Farmer kills the wife"; "The wife kills the child", and so on. This might be what they were singing, or I might have heard it wrong. It very well could be what they were singing, since the movie involves a man murdering his wife when he catches her in an adulterous act with the milkman.

I came here to find the lyrics of the song, as I do not remember singing it that way as a child. I think we used "The farmer takes a wife" and so forth. I grew up in Virginia, born in 1960. As a child, this is one of the games that we played in a skipping around circle with one child in the center. I also believe that we would trade out the middle child with each verse. There were six kids in my family, and lots of neighborhood children who would gather daily, as we would entertain ourselves with skip rope jingles, string games, jacks, hand clapping songs and team games. We were very familiar with Mother Goose nursery rhymes; silly tricks and practical jokes were common amongst us.

I went to Turner Classic Movie's website, and found the title of that movie to be "Street Scene". A synopsis of the movie can be found online at http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title.jsp?stid=91708. This webpage indicates that this movie is not yet available on home video; perhaps it could still be considered a viable documentation source.

I hope you found this interesting to consider. RiverWader (talk) 16:31, 5 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Wedding tradition

There's nothing here about the origins of the wedding tradition of the bride and groom feeding each other wedding cake while the guests sing a verse of this song using the lyrics "the bride/groom feeds the groom/bride." Does anyone know about this?76.210.251.172 (talk) 06:44, 4 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

"Derry-o"?

I learned it as "Hie-Ho, the Merry-O".

Could have been changed to "Dairy-O"? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.95.43.249 (talk) 00:48, 1 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Have also heard "Hie-Ho, the Merry-O". Also "Hie-Ho, the Cherry-O"! (talk) 19:22, 3 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, bizarre that they're spelling it after a miscapitalized random Irish town instead of the farmer and his cow. Given the current text and where we are, it's possibly from Brits trying to approximate what they misunderstand the American pronunciation to be saying. Aside from a random cite for the British-style hyphen-ation of "Hi Ho" (compare the more likely "Heigh-Ho" in its separate article), it's currently entirely unsourced. The lyrics should be corrected (including both misspellings in the chorus) but we should have a cite for the whole set of lyrics when we do. Variants can be dealt with using {{efn}} notes or in paragraphs under the lyrics. — LlywelynII 04:22, 8 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Farmer in the Dell.

Movie. ‘Street Scene’ . 1931:

The farmer kills the wife.

The wife kills the child.

The child kills the nurse.

The nurse kills The dog.

Hi Ho the derry-o.

Is this the original version ? 2600:1017:B12B:17E2:E854:8C30:89FA:665 (talk) 05:19, 25 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

No, particularly including the misspelled chorus. — LlywelynII 04:23, 8 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]