Why do we say “Sticks and stones”?

It’s short for a playground comeback: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” A doctor writing in a Liverpool paper in 1857 called it “the schoolboy’s rhyme.” By 1862 a Philadelphia paper, The Christian Recorder, was already calling it an “old adage,” so children were likely chanting it long before anyone wrote it down.