I met this in the book "The Secret Garden"
"Mistress Mary quite contrary"
Thank you
It is mysterious! It is a familiar "nursery rhyme" or "Mother Goose rhyme" that many, many English speakers learn in childhood. The origin and meaning of many of these rhymes isn't even known; some of them are though to be social and political jokes from the 1700s.
This rhyme--and I'm typing it from memory--is:
Mistress Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockle shells, and pretty maids all in a row.
A "contrary" person is someone who hates obeying and always does the opposite of what they are told, out of sheer stubbornness. "Contrary" means opposite. In music, a piano piece with "contrary motion" is one in which the notes in the treble go up while the notes in the bass go down, and vice versa. "Contrary to what Aristotle wrote, heavy objects and light objects fall at almost exactly the same speed" means that the truth is the opposite of what Aristotle wrote.
Here are some other familiar but puzzling nursery rhymes:
Ring-around-a-rosy,
Pocket full of posies,
Ashes! Ashes! We all fall down.
and
Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye,
Four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie,
When the pie was opened the birds began to sing--
Wasn't that a dainty dish to set before a king?
You can look them up in Wikipedia for various theories and guesses about what (if anything) they mean.
