Dark Meaning Behind Nursery Rhyme 'It's Raining It's Pouring' Is Making People Question Their Childhoods

‘It's raining, it's pouring,’ was a song many of us sang on the way home from school, often while getting soaked by the rain. 

Nursery rhymes like that one, along with Humpty Dumpty, Jack and Jill, or the dish that ran away with the spoon, were all huge parts of our childhood.

What’s strange is how we all seem to know these rhymes without remembering exactly when or how we learned them. They just became part of our lives. 

But now, it turns out that the seemingly sweet little song about rain has a much darker meaning.

Apparently, this song carries an "important" lesson behind it. Doesn’t that sound dull?

Over on TikTok, a teacher who goes by the name 'Stupid Little Genius' recently shared the 'real meaning' behind this well-known nursery rhyme that has been stuck in our heads for ages.

TikTok/@stupidlittlegenius

She starts off by creepily singing the lyrics: “It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring. He went to bed, and bumped his head, and couldn’t get up in the morning.”

The teacher explains that the rhyme isn’t about a specific person but serves as a kind of "cautionary tale."

She adds, "Surprisingly, this rhyme has nothing to do with the weather at all. In actual fact, the old man liked a good drink."

Well, haven’t we all? But it turns out that he liked his drinks so much that "raining" and "pouring" are actually referring to alcohol, not rain.

According to her, it's "raining cocktails and shots" – not rain from the sky.

She then talks about the old man who loved to have a few too many drinks. After a while, he decided it was time to sleep off the booze. He started to doze off and began snoring.

"But by this point, he was so inebriated that he probably couldn’t even walk in a straight line. So, when he went to bed, he stumbled, fell, or otherwise drunkenly bumped his head."

TikTok/@stupidlittlegenius

The teacher, who says she "loves knowing where phrases come from," claims that the bump was so bad that the reason the old man "couldn’t get up" was because "he was dead."

She adds: "Most experts agree that the old man never got up again because he suffered from a major head trauma."

The teacher finishes by giving us all a reminder to not drink so much that we "bump our head" and "end up dead."

One TikTok user commented, "I’ve been wondering about this one! It always seemed so needlessly grim, but now I know it’s just needfully grim."

Others were just as shocked, writing things like, "Why can't anything be pure," and calling the rhyme "brutal."

Some offered their own theories, like one person who said, "I took it as his wife hit him on his head because of his snoring."

Now that is really brutal.