Meanings
There were superstitious beliefs that it was unlucky to kill a ladybird, and that the verse would make them fly off. Another superstition states that you should chant the verse if a ladybird lands on you: if it then flies away again, your wish will come true.
Ladybirds are useful as eaters of aphids, which would otherwise damage plants. They can also be a nuisance, but there would be logic from a farmer or gardener’s viewpoint in trying to shoo them away rather than kill them. This could be the rational basis for teaching children to respect them.
This little Nan version could be a reference to the habit of setting fires to smoke the bugs out of plants. It caused the ladybugs to fly away. The younger insects, in maggot form, would have to crawl away. Thus "your children all roam". The insects in pupate form, within their shells, would not be able to flee the danger and thus would die from the smoke or fire. The idea is that Nan is within her pupal case and cannot flee until she breaks free - "weaving her laces", undoing her pupal case.
Several more variants exist, some saying "your children alone". Variants are known in the USA, some attached to Doodlebugs.
Read more about this topic: Ladybird Ladybird
Famous quotes containing the word meanings:
“An amoeba is a formless thing which takes many shapes. It moves by thrusting out an arm, and flowing into the arm. It multiplies by pulling itself in two, without permanently diminishing the original. So with words. A meaning may develop on the periphery of the body of meanings associated with a word, and shortly this tentacle-meaning has grown to such proportions that it dwarfs all other meanings.”
—Charlton Laird (b. 1901)
“Our mother gives us our earliest lessons in love—and its partner, hate. Our father—our “second other”Melaborates on them. Offering us an alternative to the mother-baby relationship . . . presenting a masculine model which can supplement and contrast with the feminine. And providing us with further and perhaps quite different meanings of lovable and loving and being loved.”
—Judith Viorst (20th century)
“Man cannot bury his meanings so deep in his book, but time and like-minded men will find them. Plato had a secret doctrine, had he? What secret can he conceal from the eyes of Bacon? of Montaigne? of Kant? Therefore, Aristotle said of his works, “They are published and not published.””
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)