Pop Goes the Weasel
Making Sense of a Nonsense Nursery Rhyme
Half a pound of tuppenny rice
Half a pound of treacle
That’s the way the money goes,
Pop! goes the weasel.
Up and down the City road,
in and out the Eagle
That’s the way the money goes,
Pop goes the weasel.
The variations of the nursery rhyme Pop goes the Weasel are diverse. Perhaps one of the reasons for the diversity is that the passage of time has rendered the rhyme so meaningless to modern people that they simply take the imagery away concocting their own interpretive rhymes to fit into the delightful swing of the tune.
Cockney Rhyming Slang
The rhyme dates back to the 1700’s. During that time, a group of working class people who lived on the east side of London near St Mary-le-Bow were known as cockneys. A true cockney was a person within earshot of Bow Bells (the bells of St Mary-le-Bow) and who spoke with a cockney accent. The incomprehensibility of Pop goes the Weasel to modern people lies in its origins as a rhyme created in cockney rhyming slang (CRS).
Translation of the Slang in Pop Goes the Weasel
In CRS, Pop is a slang word for ‘pawn.’ Weasel is shorthand for ‘weasel and stoat’, which translates as coat. In that era, how you dressed for Sunday worship was important. As a result, even the poorest people had their Sunday Best. When money was tight, they would pawn their Sunday Best on Monday and claim it on Friday. The pawning on Monday of their Sundays Best would be ‘popping their weasel.’
For some people, this was a weekly ritual. On Monday, they would pawn their coat for money to buy food and on the weekend when they were paid, they would buy back their coat for Sunday. On Monday, the cycle would begin again – ‘in and out, the money goes.’ The money would then be spent on food items such as rice and treacle.
Half a pound of tuppenny rice
Half a pound of treacle
Treacle is cane sugar that is refined into a syrup by a process of boiling. The treacle referred to in the rhyme is probably from the second boiling and is what we call molasses.
Landmarks in Pop Goes the Weasel
The City Road was a road in London on which The Eagle was located. The Eagle refers simply to a local bar or tavern called ‘The Eagle Tavern.’ Clearly, someone spent some of that hard-earned money in the bar. Imagine the exasperated wife ‘that’s the way the money goes! Pop goes the weasel.’
Simply translated the buoyant sounding verse, Pop goes the Weasel is a worker’s lament on a weekly ritual of survival in their lives.
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