mjmooney Posted November 4, 2010 VT Supporter Share Posted November 4, 2010 In the song Yankee Doodle, is he calling the horse or the feather "macaroni"? A macaroni (or formerly maccaroni) in mid-18th century England, was a fashionable fellow who dressed and even spoke in an outlandishly affected and epicene manner. The term pejoratively referred to a man who "exceeded the ordinary bounds of fashion" in terms of clothes, fastidious eating and gambling. Like a practitioner of macaronic verse, which mixed together English and Latin to comic effect, he mixed Continental affectations with his English nature, laying himself open to satire: There is indeed a kind of animal, neither male nor female, a thing of the neuter gender, lately [1770] started up among us. It is called a macaroni. It talks without meaning, it smiles without pleasantry, it eats without appetite, it rides without exercise, it wenches without passion. Young men who had been to Italy on the Grand Tour adopted the Italian word maccherone – a boorish fool in Italian – and said that anything that was fashionable or à la mode was 'very maccaroni'. Horace Walpole wrote to a friend in 1764 of "the Macaroni Club, which is composed of all the traveled young men who wear long curls and spying-glasses." The "club" was not a formal one: the expression was particularly used to characterize fops who dressed in high fashion with tall, powdered wigs with a chapeau bras on top that could only be removed on the point of a sword. The macaronis were precursor to the dandies, who far from their present connotation of effeminacy came as a more masculine reaction to the excesses of the macaroni. The shop of engravers and printsellers Mary and Matthew Darly in the fashionable West End of London sold their sets of satirical "macaroni" caricature prints, published between 1771 and 1773. The new Darly shop became known as "The Macaroni Print-Shop". In 1773, James Boswell was on tour in Scotland with the stout and serious-minded essayist and lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson, the least dandified of Londoners. Johnson was awkward in the saddle, and Boswell ribbed him: “You are a delicate Londoner; you are a maccaroni; you can't ride.” In Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (1773), when the misunderstanding is discovered and young Marlow finds he has been mistaken, he cries out, “So then, all's out, and I have been damnably imposed on. O, confound my stupid head, I shall be laughed at over the whole town. I shall be stuck up in caricatura in all the print-shops. The Dullissimo Maccaroni. To mistake this house of all others for an inn, and my father's old friend for an innkeeper!” The song “Yankee Doodle”, from the time of the American Revolutionary War, mentions a man who "stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni," the joke being that the Yankees were naive enough to believe that a feather in the hat was a sufficient mark of a macaroni. Whether or not these were alternative lyrics sung in the British army, they were enthusiastically taken up by the Yankees themselves.(Wikipedia with an annoying url. Google it). Doesn't really answer the question, but that's BOF's problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theunderstudy Posted November 4, 2010 Share Posted November 4, 2010 What happened after the end of LockStock? Did he rescue the guns? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GarethRDR Posted November 5, 2010 Share Posted November 5, 2010 Amiga or Atari? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dante_Lockhart Posted November 5, 2010 Share Posted November 5, 2010 Can Swans sense fear? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lombardo Posted November 5, 2010 Share Posted November 5, 2010 Are the Kings of Leon worth going to see? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Amsterdam_Neil_D Posted November 5, 2010 Share Posted November 5, 2010 What has the date 10/10/10, digging a tunnel through the earth (theoretically of course so straight down until it comes out the other side, for this presume it comes out on land) and Douglas Adams got in common ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Amsterdam_Neil_D Posted November 5, 2010 Share Posted November 5, 2010 Why do freezers freeze items from the top down. Logic suggests it should be from the bottom up. Why does hot water freeze quicker than cold water? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Amsterdam_Neil_D Posted November 5, 2010 Share Posted November 5, 2010 If you have a laser pen and shine it into space, how far will it go ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Meath_Villan Posted November 5, 2010 Share Posted November 5, 2010 what causes the phantom shit? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TrentVilla Posted November 5, 2010 Moderator Share Posted November 5, 2010 How long is the average wait for an answer these days on this thread? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Meath_Villan Posted November 5, 2010 Share Posted November 5, 2010 Does your boss know the amount of time you spend in this website at work? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GarethRDR Posted November 5, 2010 Share Posted November 5, 2010 what causes the phantom shit? Toilet ninjas. Duh. 8) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theunderstudy Posted November 5, 2010 Share Posted November 5, 2010 Why is Croydon allowed to exist? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Amsterdam_Neil_D Posted November 5, 2010 Share Posted November 5, 2010 Does your boss know the amount of time you spend in this website at work? Not really, I look after the ISA :-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Amsterdam_Neil_D Posted November 5, 2010 Share Posted November 5, 2010 The Large Hadron Collider is always breaking itself. Is this because it is a gateway to the future and someone or something is coming back in time and breaking it on purpose, one of the breaks was a weld that went wrong. Not very easy to believe on a projerct such as this. The multiverse could be involved also I suppose but only BOF has an in on this I presume? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OutByEaster? Posted November 5, 2010 Moderator Share Posted November 5, 2010 Lola or Layla? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
peterms Posted November 5, 2010 Share Posted November 5, 2010 BOF, where the **** did I put that screwdriver? I had it not five minutes ago. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theunderstudy Posted November 5, 2010 Share Posted November 5, 2010 BOF why does my cars shock absober fastener refuse to tighten properly? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rjw63 Posted November 6, 2010 Share Posted November 6, 2010 BOF would YOU be bummed by a ginger for a million quid? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pelle Posted November 6, 2010 Share Posted November 6, 2010 ^^^ Got an offer you couldn't refuse, Rob? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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