July 01, 2006
The other day I heard some school children sing a fine, old tune, Yankee Doodle, and ever since, I cannot stop whistling the melody.
For the record, I do not go around whistling Revolutionary War tunes as a rule, but since it is almost the Fourth of July, I figure that if children enjoy singing it that much, so can I.
Linguistic experts tell us that the term Yankee Doodle has had a bad rap over the years and has often been misunderstood.
None-the-less, the song Yankee Doodle remains a happy one, light-hearted and whimsical.
The words are easy for many of us to remember because we committed them to memory in elementary school music classes.
Maybe the act of whistling the song Yankee Doodle is just what we need to do to celebrate the birth of our nation, 230 years ago in July of 1776.
To this day, the colorful lingo of Yankee Doodle reminds us of the many idiosyncrasies of colonial speech and custom.
Calling a feather macaroni was certainly one of them.
Do you remember how the lyrics go?
“Yankee Doodle went to town a-riding on a pony. Stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni. Yankee Doodle, keep it up, Yankee Doodle Dandy….”
If you are like me, those lyrics bring some questions to mind.
When we say “stick a feather in your cap” these days, I assume that we are not thinking of noodles. We do not go around naming feathers either, although it appears some colonists did.
When Yankee Doodle Dandy called that feather in his hat macaroni, was he really thinking about pasta?
Why did he stick that silly feather in his cap anyway?
What in the world is a dandy?
Norma Twilley Flynn, author of Puttin’ on the Dog, may have the answers. She writes that when macaroni pasta was introduced to the colonists, it became a very big hit.
I do not know about you, but I never before considered the idea that colonists even had pasta.
Flynn explains that macaroni was quite a fashionable dish to serve guests and soon became a slang term for anything stylish. Flynn adds that when colonists would flatter a lady by telling her how much they liked her dress, they might add, “it’s really macaroni.”
Another possibility is that macaroni meant a fancy style of Italian garb, a dandy, in colonial slang.
The English and the colonists apparently were a trendy sort as well. So when Yankee Doodle called his feather macaroni, it could be it was simply his way of being fashionable.
Unlike the modish word macaroni, the term Yankee Doodle was not deemed chic at all in colonial days.
Flynn says the Dutch used the term Yankee Doodle to mock the British when the Dutch first came to America. The British, in turn, adopted the term to ridicule the shabbily-dressed colonists who were apparently no dandies.
Yankee Doodle as a nomenclature was passed around “like a hot potato.”
When the colonists got that verbal hot potato, they ingeniously, won the battle of disparaging words by adopting it as their own.
Nowadays, we have a saying of our own that describes how the colonists dealt with name-calling: “If life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”
Exactly what the colonists did.
They liked being called Yankee Doodle Dandy, and they liked the song Yankee Doodle.
According to Flynn, the colonial army preferred the song Yankee Doodle so much; they changed some of the lyrics and took it as their marching song.
Many of us have been whistling it ever since.
As citizens of the United States of America, we are, in one sense, all legacies of the original Yankee Doodle Dandy, no matter our bloodline.
We can be proud of our generous and benevolent country, our courageous heritage, and our red, white, and blue flag.
Come to think of it, maybe it would not hurt us a bit to whistle Yankee Doodle on the Fourth of July and apologize to no one for doing it.
Maybe, just maybe, we should all stick a feather in our cap, too!
