There have been articles dissecting the history or false history of school yard rhymes. It seems no one can agree on what ring around the rosie means or where it came from. But there is still something strange and haunting about some of them.
Skipping Games, those jump rope games accompanied by rhymes, are explored by Julia Bishop on the British Library web site. There are some vintage video studies of these skipping games. Though I’m sure children in the USA were skipping to different rhymes at the time, it is both nostalgic and fascinated to read about the history of something we knew well, but left behind us long ago.
Any discussion on the origin of the giallo, whether the discussion is concerned with the literature or the film phenomenon, will most likely begin with an explanation that the giallo took its name from the yellow book covers used by Mondadori to color code their mystery novel publications (Pieri, 2011; Koven, 2006; Needham, 2002). Eventually, giallo became a term used for any type of detective fiction, story with a mystery element, or intrigue. Mikel Koven would coin it a “metonym for the entire mystery genre (2006 p2-3).” Initially, between WWI and WWII, the stories were imported from the UK, America, and France. The foreignness helped to distance the stories of crime and murder from Italian readers while also becoming so attractive an element that Italian authors began to adopt anglicized pseudonyms to put their locally produced work on even footing with the popular imports (Pierri, 2011; Needham, 2002). Italian writers of the giallo faced another hurdle in competing with the foreign imports in the strict oversight and censorship in the Fascist regime pre WWII for their production of what was considered low brow literature. This label of ‘low brow’ followed the giallo from literature to film when the movies rose as a genre in the 60s and 70s, sometimes considered a component of a larger movement in Italian Fantasy Cinema that included horror (Palmerini & Mistretta, 1996). The giallo in film has been popularly defined by its characteristics, by time period, and by driving personalities. It has been said to be an “auteurist domain,” defined by the directorial names that made the most memorable examples of the genre; defined by Argento (Heller-Nicholas, 2012; Palmerini & Mistretts, 1996). However, similar to the debate over the rigid, proscribed, and repetitive structure of crime fiction literature giving way, through that very repetition, to a dynamic and flexible reimagining of the genre (Maher & Pezzotti, 2017), the cinematic giallo has also been described as having “an inherently ambivalent form (Koven, 2010 p144)”. Despite the giallo’s formulaic narratives and repetitious plot elements, the genre can seem even less definable in film than in literature, and may represent a cultural exchange that only adds to its fluidity and timelessness (Heller-Nicholas, 2012). As Gary Needham thoroughly points out:
I thought that I was a fan of Mark Twain’s work, though I would usually specify that I enjoyed his essays and sketches more than the novels he is typically known for. I have to admit, I am not a very good fan, perhaps of anything, because it never occurred to me to find out any more. I never knew that while working as a typesetting apprentice on his older brother’s newspaper he began penning humorous stories under pseudonyms, or that he would continue this pseudonymous writing on other papers. I knew that Mark Twain was a pseudonym, but I never knew that it was simply a later and greater pseudonym that followed: W. Epaminondas Adrastus Perkins, W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab, Rambler, grumbler, Peter Pencilcase’s Son, John Snooks, and Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, and A Dog-Be-Deviled Citizen… A curious and, perhaps tenacious, view through 
on my dining room wall. I had inherited it from my grandmother. I remember sleeplessly looking up at it on the wall of her den during ‘nap time.’ A notation on the bottom says it was copyright in 1900 by Jos. Hoover & Sons. The signature reads ‘LeRoy’ with a circular flourish around it.
My last mention of the Internet Archive’s 
