Words not deeds

Posted by Henry on January 06, 2004

In Reply to: Double Deed posted by itzhar on January 06, 2004

: I am looking for the meaning of double deed, as in this famous song. Can you please help?
: Thanks, Itzhar

I don't think that it has any deep significant meaning! There's a lovely version on the CD Lusignac by Chris Wood and Andy Cutting.

www.williamgaddis.org/ recognitions/I3anno2.shtml
There was a man of double deed: an anonymous children's "rhyme of strange fascination; many people have recalled the awe-inspiring effect it had on them when children, and yet how they continued to want it repeated to them" (Iona and Peter Opie, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951], 286). Number 75 in The Annotated Mother Goose, where the rhyme begins: "A man of words and not of deeds / Is like a garden full of weeds."