I am currently up to my ears in counting rhymes, etc. My toddler got a four CD set of nursery rhymes and playground tunes. While a rather shocking number have had the violence edited out of them (the farmer's wife now cuts the mice slices of cheese with a carving knife! And the Old Woman who Lives in a Shoe hugs and kisses her children before sending them to bed!), I have also been musing lately on the number of head injuries in children's rhymes, as, for instance:
It's raining, it's pouring
The old man is snoring
He bumped his head and went to bed
And couldn't get up in the morning
I mean, heavens, the man is clearly in a coma!
And then of course there is the thinly-veiled sexual content of many a jumprope rhyme, often involving doctors being sent for:
Cinderella
Dressed in yella
Went upstairs to see her fella
How many kisses did she get?
one two three, etc.
Followed by:
Cinderella
Dressed in yella
Went upstairs to kiss her fella
By mistake
She kissed a snake
How many doctors did it take?
As for un-PC nursery rhymes, this one seems innocent enough:
Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear,
Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair,
Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn't fuzzy, was he?
until you realize that Fuzzy Wuzzy was a term British soldiers used for warriors in the Sudan, see Kipling's
Fuzzy Wuzzy