Genuinely asking, what is the urban legend around Ring a Rosie? And what's the truth if it's known?
The urban legend is that it’s about the Black Plague, with varying attestations for what the different parts of the song “represent”
As far as the “truth goes, there isn’t exactly a “true” meaning of the song that people are actually missing, it’s more that, like a lot of folkloric things, there are a sprawling number of variations of the song and the primary thing tying them together is that they’re basically just instructions for the children’s game that goes along with them.
That might be a boring answer, and there might be people who still take that and argue the one specific version everyone sees plague allusions in is still “really” about that, but there’s never been any evidence that quantifies that, it’s just a story that has pervaded the public consciousness. The time period it first pops up isn’t one where plague would have been a go-to topic (and the earliest versions don’t feature most of the “proof” people point to), a lot of the claims people make are only viable in retrospect (the language not being anything that was actually used in the relevant eras), and etc. It’s not so much that there’s something else it’s about instead as it is that it’s almost certainly just a nonsense song that’s had an alternate meaning ascribed to it very recently.
Which you know, definitely happens. You could even argue that it coming to represent something else is just sort of how folklore works. But it’s the fact that people like to use it as a “gotcha” or to show off their trivia knowledge, and that the claim is a completely unsubstantiated one presented as something that has always been fact that gets me.
