Your trivia for the evening: Tonights final Jeopardy got me curious about the meaning of Yankee Doodle. Why would he stick a feather in his cap and call it macaroni? And why did Jeopardy reference young men called macaronis? According to nprs website, in an interview with Chris Roberts, a librarian and author, The key to this is the last word, `macaroni. Now we all know macaroni as an Italian dish, as a very tasty Italian dish, in fact. But in this rhyme what the macaroni is referring to is an English youth cult from the 1760s and 70s. For those of you old enough to remember The Romantics of the 1980s, thats probably the closest analogy youll get to the macaronis incredibly dandified youth--huge wigs, tight jackets, winklepicker shoes. They stopped the streets of London when they were walking around and they had a very strong influence on fashion, much beyond their original numbers. And their favorite food was macaroni which came to be the name for the movement. So what this most popular version of Yankee Doodle is, in fact, doing--it is saying that you cant just stick a feather in your hat and pass yourself off as a macaroni. It takes much more effort than that. Its a put-down, if you like, of what they would see as hayseed colonials trying to emulate the dandified youth of London town. And thats essentially the base of the most famous version of the rhyme. And a couple of other sites all agreed that the song was written by the British as a put-down of the colonists. Now you know. Oh, and doodle is the origin of the word dude.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 03:56:21 +0000
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