‘It’s raining, it’s pouring,’ we’d sing on the way home from school, getting absolutely drenched.
Nursery rhymes like that and the likes of our good mate Humpty Dumpty, Jack and Jill, or even the dish that ran away with the spoon – were major parts of our childhood.
We all just seem to know them without ever remembering actually learning them in the first place.
But now it turns out that once sweet song about it raining outside has a much darker meaning.
A song with an ‘important’ lesson behind it…how boring.
Over on TikTok, a teacher who goes by the name of ‘Stupid Little Genius’ revealed the ‘real meaning’ of the nursery rhyme that’s been engraved into our brains for far too long.
TikTok/@stupidlittlegenius
She starts off with a bit of creepy singing of the lyrics: “It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring. He went to bed, and bumped his head, and couldn’t get up in the morning.”
The teacher points out that the rhyme isn’t pointing out a specific person but rather tells us a ‘cautionary tale’.
She says: “Surprisingly, this rhyme has nothing to do with the weather at all. In actual fact, the old man liked a good drink.”
Yeah, us too. But apparently, he liked it so much that ‘raining’ and ‘pouring’ refer to booze, not the weather.
She says it’s ‘raining cocktails and shots’ – not rain itself.
Talking about said old man with the love for a few too many drinks, she says ‘he decided it’s time to sleep it off’ after starting to nod off and snore.
TikTok/@stupidlittlegenius
“But by this point he was so inebriated he probably couldn’t even walk in a straight line. So, when he went to bed he stumbled, fell or otherwise drunkenly bumped his head.”
The teacher, who ‘loves knowing where phrases come from’ then claims the bump was so bad that the reason he ‘couldn’t get up’ is because ‘he was dead’.
She claims: “Most experts agree that the old man never got up again because he suffered from a major head trauma.”
The woman concludes by reminding us not to drink so much we ‘bump our head’ and ‘end up dead’.
One TikTok user commented: “I’ve been wondering about this one! It always seemed so needlessly grim, but now I know it’s just needfully grim.”
And others were in shock as they wrote: “Why can’t anything be pure,” and called it ‘brutal’.
But others offered different theories, such as: “I took it as his wife hit him on his head because of his snoring.” And that really is brutal.
