I am only five, and I watch the girls at school with skipping ropes.
They jump and sing a funny song that goes,
"Three, six, nine,
The goose drank wine..."
I’m five, geese don’t drink wine, and I know that because I’ve met lots of geese on the Island of Bute, where I went on holiday every summer. We stayed on a farm, and none of the geese drank wine at all.
In A Child's Voice: When the Words Don’t Add Up
To an adult ear, a children’s skipping rhyme is nonsense. Geese drink wine. Numbers slide into animals. A monkey chokes on something unnamed. Events occur without explanation or consequence. Meaning collapses almost as soon as one tries to follow it.
But to a five-year-old, the problem is not whether the rhyme makes sense. The question is what kind of sense it makes.
A child does not enter language as a logician. They enter it as a listener, a mimicker, a collector of sounds. Rhythm arrives before reason. Repetition comes before explanation. If the words move together, if they keep time with the feet and the rope, then they belong together. Rhythm itself carries authority.
At five, numbers are not abstractions but stepping stones. Saying them aloud is already a pleasure. Animals are not symbols either; they are characters—elastic, vivid, capable of doing what people do without moral fuss. A goose can drink wine. A monkey can choke and vanish. The imagination does not yet care about category errors. The world has not been sorted into the possible and the impossible, only into what is spoken and what is not.
What matters most is that the rhyme returns unchanged. Each time it is sung, it arrives as it always has. That sameness creates comfort. The child learns—without being told—that words can be strange and still be trusted. They do not have to describe reality accurately in order to hold. Accuracy, in fact, may be beside the point.
The rhyme exists to be jumped to, to be shared, to mark time together. Meaning is secondary to participation. Sense emerges not from explanation but from use.
Yet something quieter is also taking place. The child notices, dimly, without the language to name it, that stories do not always explain themselves. Things happen. Then something happens next. The monkey is fine, and then it is not. No reason is given. No comfort is offered. This mirrors the child’s own experience of the world, where rules are partial, adults decide without justification, and outcomes arrive suddenly.
In that way, the rhyme is not nonsense at all. It is honest.
When the words don’t add up, the five-year-old does not discard them. They live with them. They allow them to hover unresolved. The mind learns that language can be playful, arbitrary, even a little cruel, and still be beautiful. This is an early education in metaphor, long before the word itself is learned.
Perhaps this is why such rhymes stay with us. Not because they ever made sense, but because they taught us—very early on—that not everything has to.
Image by Copilot
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