By Jack Hobbs
Humpty Dumpty is not what he’s cracked up to be, according to one childhood dream killer.
Popular YA author Holly Bourne scrambled the brains of many a social media watchdog Monday — by tweeting that the classic nursery rhyme character Humpty Dumpty is not an egg.
“Who decided Humpty Dumpty was an egg?” the Brit-born Bourne, 36, asked in her incendiary tweet, racking up nearly a half-million views on the platform.
“Its not in the lyrics, and deciding he’s a giant egg is quite a random leap for someone to make, and everyone else being like, ‘yeah, a giant egg on a wall. Of course.’”
The old-school ditty — talk-sang to countless children around the globe for ages — traditionally states that Dumpty was sitting on a wall before suffering a great fall and later had all the king’s horses and all his men attempt to put him back together.
“Also, imagine having NO ARMY because they’re busy fixing a broken egg,” Bourne continued in her viral Twitter thread. “The king sent literally EVERYONE out to save the giant egg who isn’t actually an egg, leaving the realm wide open for attack.”
“Humpty Dumpty” first appeared in 1797 as a part of the book “Juvenile Amusements” by Samuel Arnold, an English author. The character first appeared as an egg in Lewis Carroll’s 1871 novel “Through the Looking Glass” and has since remained that way.
Another egg-citing theory has the inspiration of the character being a cannon used in the English Civil War that was used to keep the Parliament Army at bay till the wall underneath the cannon crumbled causing the cannon to fall down.
The tweet left many Twitter users feeling like they had some proverbial egg on their faces.
“Okay [not gonna lie] this tweet f–ked me up, so I obviously went reading and the answer is either Lewis Carroll or The Dutch,” tweeted one user. “But this is genuinely the first time I’ve realized he’s not explicitly an egg.”
Another deep thinker chimed in: “This has troubled me for ages! Glad you put it out there.”
Meanwhile, the tweet simply bedeviled other users.
“Holly this has blown my MIND,” cried one shell-shocked commenter.
“Playschool has a lot to answer for,” joked another twit wit.
