Talk:Fuzzy Wuzzy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Books Portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Books. To participate, you can edit the article. You can discuss the Project at its talk page.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the Project's quality scale. Please rate the article and then leave a short summary at in the comments to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article.

"Historical background

The Beja people were one of two broad multi-tribal groupings supporting the Mahdi, and were divided into three tribes. One of these, the Hadendoa, was nomadic along Sudan's Red Sea coast and provided a large number of cavalry and mounted infantry(called jehadiya). They carried breech-loaded rifles, and many of them had acquired military experience in the Egyptian army.

The name "Fuzzy Wuzzy" may be purely English in origin, or it may incorporate some sort of Arabic pun (possibly based on ghazi, "warrior"). It alludes to their butter-matted hair which gave them a "frizzy" look. This represents a rather weak attempt at humor on the part of British imperial troops, which had learned to respect the Hadendoa on the battlefield. [edit]

Contents 1 The children's rhyme 2 Connections to Operations Research 3 Dad's Army? 4 Dad's Army?

[edit] The children's rhyme

   Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear
   Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair
   Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn't fuzzy, was he?

       (Optional fourth line:) Was he bare?

Please provide a citation for this text: who wrote or published it? When? Is republishing it here a violation of copyright? Are you sure of the wording? I remember it differently. Jerry lavoie 03:39, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Few today are aware of the nineteenth-century Sudanese origins of this familiar nursery rhyme. The first line, "...was a bear" translates roughly as "The Hadendoa warriors gave us (British) a great deal of trouble." The second line is odd as the "Fuzzy Wuzzy" were in fact well-known for their full heads of wooly hair."

>>> The bold words represent potential factual inaccuracies and some obvious hints of bias against the British?

>>> Obvious hints? Say what? There's no bias there at all. As any good dictionary will tell you, "is/was a bear" is a long-established idiom for describing something that's a great deal of trouble; and the Hadendoa, then referred to as Fuzzy-Wuzzies, did in fact give the British military a hard fight. If you want a citation, you can get one in full from Rudyard Kipling:

http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/verse/volumeXI/fuzzywuzzy.html

[edit] Connections to Operations Research

I've heard the so called "Lanchester's Law" - the strength of a military force is proportional to the square of its numbers - cited as the "Fuzzy Wuzzy formula" long before the Gamasutra article cited in the "Lanchester's Law" article. As explained to me - by operations researchers working for the U.S. Department of Defense - the connection to the rhyme is as follows:

"Fuzzy wuzzy was a bear" - the fuzzy wuzzies gave the better trained British troops unexpected trouble.

"Fuzzy wuzzy had no hair" - the formula explaining why the fuzzy wuzzies did so well was a clean, square root relationship, not a complex, "hairy" one. The strength of the forces scaled only linearly with the firepower of the British troops, but with the square of the numerically superior fuzzy wuzzy troops.

"Fuzzy wuzzy wasn't fuzzy was he?" - play on words that the problem turned out not to be "hairy" after all.

This may have nothing to do with the origins of the nursery rhyme. Then again, lots of innocent British nursery rhymes in fact have origins in violent or gruesome incidents in British history - e.g., "Mary, mary quite contrary" and Mary Queen of Scots' refusal to cooperate after being imprisoned by her cousin Elizabeth I, resulting ultimately in Elizabeth's having Mary beheaded.

Warren Dew 04:50, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Dad's Army?

I for one would think that most people today, at least in Britain, would have heard the phrase not in some '40s children's rhyme or a Rudyard Kipling poem, but in Dad's Army. Specifically, Corporal Jones' comments about having fought "the Fuzzy-Wuzzies" with Lord Kitchener.

[edit] Dad's Army?

I for one would think that most people today, at least in Britain, would have heard the phrase not in some '40s children's rhyme or a Rudyard Kipling poem, but in Dad's Army. Specifically, Corporal Jones' comments about having fought "the Fuzzy-Wuzzies" with Lord Kitchener. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.26.60.62 (talk) 15:16, 26 May 2008 (UTC)