Emoticons

 the rosie,

A pocket full of posies,

Ashes! Ashes!

We all fall down.”

This seemingly gleeful and sonorous childhood nursery rhyme is all but gleeful, except for the tune, and is in fact dreadfully morbid.  The children’s song actually describes the insignia and characteristic bulls eye rash associated with the bubonic plague – a red ring around a red spot – and the subsequent reality of death that almost certainly followed infection – that its contractors would “all fall down”.  Paradoxical that something so awful could be whitewashed as placid and tame and even become a playful and jubilant theme.  Come to think, this is actually the case with most nursery rhymes, even disregarding the LSD-inspired writings of Lewis Carroll.  “Rock-a-bye baby, in the treetop…”; one might ask themselves why child protective services hasn’t been called if there’s a baby rocking on a broken limb in the top of a tree.  “There was an old lady who lived in a shoe…”; need we say more?  “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, Catch a tiger by the toe…”; I’m afraid before you pick who’s ‘it’ next, you will be eaten by the tiger who is less than compelled that you have caught it by the toe.  After Jack and Jill go on their water-gathering excursion “Jack fell down and broke his crown…”; which is to say, he burst his head into more pieces than Humpty Dumpty falling off the wall.  Or perhaps one of the most morbid of all:

“Eeper Weeper, chimney sweeper,

Had a wife but couldn't keep her.

Had another, didn't love her,

Up the chimney he did shove her.”

Now we have immortalized a man who was a second-rate husband to his first wife and a murderer to his second.  

The point here is that it is an unfortunate reality that societies can plaster over the vileness of certain actualities as to make them less appalling or at least more palatable for the youthful mind.  There’s nothing wrong with the aspiration to protect children from certain cruelties that exist in this fallen world, but if this is carried to the extent of wrapping them in bubble wrap and Styrofoam so as to prevent falling and scraping their knee, and saying that sodium hypochlorite (bleach) is actually candy-coated raindrops, and that tigers are playful, big kittens that always behave like they do for the circus master then one would actually be placing their child in more danger than by simply stating the plain and simple truth beforehand.  This is precisely the phenomenon that occurred with the symbol that used to be directly associated with toxic substances that can and will cause death if consumed in sufficient quantities.  This symbol, the skull and crossbones beneath – supposedly revealing what would be left of you should you consume a certain product – somewhere along the way became commandeered by swashbuckling pirates as their own frightening insignia hoisted to the top of their masts.  This, too, should have been fear-instilling as the pirates were making a statement that they were as toxic as deadly poisons as well (I wonder if this is where the buzzword, “toxic”, for all relationship columnists originated to describe unhealthy relationships?).  But the skull and crossbones became more associated with adventure, treasure hunting and even fantastical and playful swashbuckling swordfights in the minds of many children and thus became a symbol of amusement rather than of death.  Thus, the symbol that once was reminiscent of death became reminiscent of ‘play’ and lost its repulsive effect.  This led a physician from Pittsburgh to design a new label symbol to deter children from poisonous substances and the result was “Mr. Yuk”, a green ‘emoticon’ face with tongue protruded to show disgust (or emesis) and furrowed eyebrows to show disgust.  Of course, in today’s world where our fingers are more ready to text than drive and often try to do both simultaneously and with the explosion of using ‘emoticons’ in place of entire paragraphs, likely because of lack of vocabulary to do otherwise, this symbol may, too, be in danger of obsolescence of conveying the deadly warning it was intended to and children will need to have the plain reality of poisons explained to them.  It would have been a bad idea to tell your child in 2003 that someone may have sent a ‘perfumed’ letter in the mail when it was actually coated with anthrax.  Sometimes the truth is difficult and scary, but it is often much less scary than the reality that it describes.