History 1886 style… We may teach our kids, but we are still up to learning ourselves

Ever hear the phrase, “sleep tight” or the song, “Pop Goes the Weasel”? Both phrases came from the 1880s and though I had heard both of them before I didn’t know the history behind them or really even what they meant. Like the line from “Princess Bride” by Inigo Montoya “I don’t think that word means what you think it means”.

First let’s go with the phrase sleep tight, though I’ve said this to my kids, I clearly didn’t know its history. In the 1800s they didn’t have bed springs, so they used ropes. If you ever used rope, then you know they stretch over time and every couple days the mattress would start to sag. Below is a picture of the key to tighten the ropes.

Now this is an added bonus to bed history. See the top of the bed, the part that looks like a roller? Well, guess what… It is. They would take that part off every night and roll out the lumps in the bed.

Pop goes the weasel is a catchy little children’s song, but do you know what it really means? Well, I do now! It seems it was actually a piece of education itself designed to help kids remember the lessons they were taught about using the weasel. What is a weasel? I can tell you this, it isn’t the animal that we all thought it was as a kid.

Pictured below is a weasel. It was used to measure yarn into a skein and after 30 turns the back part of the weasel would pop up and there we have the phrase “Pop Goes the Weasel”, and you would have a full skein of yarn.

Hope you enjoyed today’s history lesson and hopefully while we are educating our children about the world around us, we can share some of the things I’ve learned with you.