Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye, four-and-twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie… I had schoolteachers who still spoke like this in 1970s Yorkshire. I

Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye, four-and-twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie… I had schoolteachers who still spoke like this in 1970s Yorkshire. I don’t know if it was a regional dialect thing or a generational thing across all England, but among the over-40s back then it was still pretty common to hear German-style backwards numbers in English.