Talk:Fuzzy Wuzzy

The children's rhyme
The Children's rhyme is from a song called "Fuzzy Wuzzy"  by Al Hoffman, Milton Drake, Jerry Livingston copyright 1944 Drake-Hoffman-Livingston, 1619 Broadway, New York, NY. The copyright may or may not still be current/active.

It has nothing to do with Rudyard Kipling's poem remotely. It seems like Fuzzy Wuzzy was used to describe a bear who was Fuzzy or Wuz he.

The song has an intro about a Private Elmer Johnson who went to Alaska and saw a strange animal. He took out a pen and wrote to the folks back home of what he saw.

Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair Wuz Fuzzy Wuzzy Fuzzy?

It continues of how the bear visited the North Pole barber shop and got his fuzzy cut off. The seals of Hudson Bay had envied the bear's fuzz. But without the bear's, fuzzy rug, he wasn't what he used to be.

It has nothing to do with '''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."

It is a story about an American service man in Alaska seeing a strange animal.

If the copyright is not current/active, the whole song lyrics could be added.

It is in the same genre as "Mairzy Doats", "I'm a Lonely Little Petunia in an Onion Patch", "I'm Singing in the Bathtub", "Chickery Chick"  (Note that "Marizy Doats"  was also written by Hoffman, Drake, Livingston - using funny words.)

Lonely Little Petunia (talk) 17:27, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

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)

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) Seconded.84.66.131.34 (talk) 22:39, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Merge?
Seems a bit pointless having two articles, this and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadendoa - I'll leave it to others to debate which should have precedence.84.66.131.34 (talk) 22:39, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Having read the section titled "Fuzzy Wuzzy Fallacy" I find I am unsure just what the fallacy was. It is unclear if the fallacy is that one soldier with twice the firepower IS or IS NOT the equivalent of 2 soldiers with half that firepower. Yes, I can guess, but guesswork should not be part of reading something here. 19:34, 16 October 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.252.180.248 (talk)