[HN Gopher] The Macaroni in 'Yankee Doodle'
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The Macaroni in 'Yankee Doodle'
Author : adolph
Score : 63 points
Date : 2021-05-12 18:27 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.atlasobscura.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.atlasobscura.com)
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| The macaroni penguin, with its colorful headfeathers, also gets
| its name from this same root.
| chubbyish wrote:
| A lot of fashion is about bravery, as mentioned in the article.
|
| People look on those who can wear what they want as free, because
| they know they are not, and that they are afraid of being judged.
|
| I saw a guy wearing a kimono and a belt yesterday. Was quite a
| sight.
|
| Typical judgmental thoughts of "look at that odd dude" went
| through my head. But I realized that I couldn't wear that and the
| reason would be other people judging me for it, or assigning
| questionable gender identity upon me.
|
| When looking back to 18th century fashion it is extreme compared
| to the extremes that people are chasing today.
|
| Everyone is trying to be different. Maybe wigs will come back.
|
| Imagine a world without fashion judgement. What would you wear?
| floren wrote:
| I was thinking the other day about half the signers of the
| Declaration of Independence either had their hair curled or in
| a ponytail, but today a grey-haired man with a short ponytail
| says "old hippy" not "founding father". Anyway if you'll excuse
| me, I'm off to get fitted for a new pair of spats.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| (2016)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12356070
| elliekelly wrote:
| > And with the girls be handy
|
| I'd never really given much thought to what this line meant but
| knowing the context it's pretty gross.
| bitwize wrote:
| I think "handy" may have an ordinary meaning here of
| "available". Ironically suggesting that women will fall for
| Yankee Doodle, so he'd best make himself available to their
| adoring attention.
| etrabroline wrote:
| It's saying the ladies like him. That's not gross at all. The
| pathologizing of heterosexuality seems to have roots in
| American Protestantism.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| The person quoted in this article[1] from NPR describes the
| stanzas "Mind the music and the step, and with the girls be
| handy" as referring to dancing properly with a lady.
|
| Given the era it comes from I can't imagine that there's a
| sexualized meaning to the words. There was certainly bawdy
| stuff back then, but from what I've read of the era I don't
| think it was casually thrown around like it is in today's (US)
| culture.
|
| [1]
| https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=497026...
| [deleted]
| moshmosh wrote:
| I always just took it as "good with", as in "handy with a
| chainsaw". Though it's old enough that it could mean almost
| anything--I don't know how far back the "good with" meaning of
| "handy" goes.
|
| Hold on, let's see what Webster's 1913 says...
|
| 2. Skillful in using the hand; dexterous; ready; adroit. "Each
| is handy in his way." Dryden.
|
| OK, that one seems a bit... vulgar, at worst, and is the sense
| I took it in, basically.
|
| What I find very funny is sense 4:
|
| 4. (Naut.) Easily managed; obedient to the helm; -- said of a
| vessel.
|
| Might the line have a double-meaning? The obvious one of "knows
| how to please a woman", but also a near-opposite second reading
| of "women walk all over him"? Kinda fits with the rest of the
| song, which reminds me a lot of The Offspring's "Pretty Fly
| (For a White Guy)".
| alisonkisk wrote:
| No, because he's handy "with" a lady, not "for" a lady.
| moshmosh wrote:
| "With", as in "among or in the company of", "the girls".
|
| [EDIT] yeah, in context it probably just means handling
| your partner well while dancing as the surface reading,
| with a possibly-intended somewhat-vulgar "hur hur hur, if
| you know what I mean" subtext.
| freshair wrote:
| This use of the word 'handy' reminds me of the classic Red
| Green Show quip: _" If women don't find you handsome, they
| should at least find you handy."_
|
| I have always taken this to mean that if you aren't good to
| look at, you can still make yourself appealing by being good
| at things. There is a possible double entendre with foreplay,
| but I never considered this joke to be suggesting
| unconsensual groping (I think that's the implication being
| suggested above?)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Green_Show#Handyman_Co.
| ..
| elliekelly wrote:
| I definitely think it's a vulgar double-meaning but I think
| it's less "women walk over over him" and more "he's gay".
| It's practically lifted right from The Miller's Tale where
| the "dandy" and feminine male boarder is repeatedly described
| as "handy" and is both clever and _literally_ very handy with
| his landlady in the "locker room talk" sense. The story ends
| with the dandy boarder taking a hot iron rod to the butt and
| the cuckholded landlord, a carpenter who you would expect to
| be stereotypically "handy", breaking his hand.
| sidlls wrote:
| "In a society that emphasized individuality, it is not hard to
| imagine that they became folk heroes of a kind--and that many of
| the people who laughed at them felt a tug of longing for the
| freedom with which they lived."
|
| This is similar to the canard that "your bully is just jealous of
| your <favorable attribute here>." It's codswallop: more like to
| be the normal reaction to a trend taken "too far," as it were,
| and something like the backlash one thinks of regarding the
| grunge, goth, "emo", and "hipster" fads. Nobody was jealous of
| the supposed freedom that these people had, so much as they were
| amused (or appalled) at the absurd lack of introspection and
| awareness they exhibited by latching onto a played out trend.
| ska wrote:
| This seems an idiosyncratic characterization to me. Bullying is
| driven by insecurity, though not necessarily jealousy.
|
| This seems quite separable from the general arc of
| subgroup/subgenre identity which seems to follow a typical arc
| of from groundbreaking through "cool", to mass adoption, to
| "played out" as you put it. The article suggests "macaroni" was
| something beyond the predictable cyclic arc, in at least that
| it's impact was unusually strong and short lived.
| Talanes wrote:
| >Nobody was jealous of the supposed freedom that these people
| had, so much as they were amused (or appalled) at the absurd
| lack of introspection and awareness they exhibited by latching
| onto a played out trend.
|
| Mocking them was just as much of a played out trend though.
| We've got evidence of it as far back as 1772 linked right
| above.
| marnett wrote:
| That's an interesting categorization of the sub-cultures/scenes
| you listed. Are there any sub-cultures you would classify as
| "other" (in the sense of being other than the status quo of its
| era) and having introspection and awareness?
| mywittyname wrote:
| Furries?
|
| I mean, their whole schtick is that they feel like a
| different animal trapped in a human body. That's pretty
| introspective and self-aware, I guess.
| klyrs wrote:
| The absurdity of the original comment is that goths and
| emos are characteristically introspective to a fault.
| Grunge and goths embodied an attempt to flee from self --
| the awareness of which was a necessity for that dynamic.
| Finally, hipsters (not the original hipsters[1], of course)
| were painfully self-aware, and self-mocking.
|
| The funniest part is where it's asserted that these "fads"
| were "played out" by the time they gained any popularity.
| Which was only true of emos; they swept aside everything
| that made grunge and goth culture aesthetically
| interesting, and adopted normcore instead. Well, true of
| hipsters, too, but "before it was cool" was their whole
| thing; the played-out nature of the fad was effectively a
| joke on everybody who cared enough to be bothered by shat
| beer and silly facial hair.
|
| But, no, I don't think you're right about furries. They
| aren't "animals trapped in a human's body," that's a
| mischaracterization used by edgelords who dunk on
| transgender people. Furries extremely diverse in their
| internal and external narratives, and I won't attempt to
| provide an alternative characterization.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_(1940s_subculture)
| sidlls wrote:
| That's quite a bit of post facto rationalization for
| various fads that amounted to little more than "this
| generation's angst manifest and given a larger platform
| thanks to an ever-expanding media footprint."
| Talanes wrote:
| I'd be willing to guess that the common denominator in those
| scenes is that the GP encountered them as teenagers. I've met
| plenty of introspective and self-aware Goths, but self-aware
| teenagers are rare.
| feoren wrote:
| Nerds/geeks. If you want to reduce it down to teen-movie-
| level stereotypes, then people in both the "popular" and
| "counterculture" groups are making decisions about what to
| wear and how to act based on what other people do or don't
| see as popular or trendy. The nerds and geeks are the ones
| who ignored all of that: band geeks, computer nerds, anime
| nerds, whatever. Of course they still try to "fit in" within
| their respective groups but their groups are centered around
| a shared interest, rather than solely what is or isn't
| popular.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I agree with you that it's codswallop, but I wholly disagree
| with you that people into the grunge, goth, emo, hipster, etc.,
| aesthetic are absurdly lacking introspection and awareness by
| latching onto a played out trend.
|
| Yes, people mocked them, but they were perfectly happy
| demonstrating that they were a member of some given group - or
| maybe just happily enjoying some given aesthetic.
| dzzo wrote:
| Grunge, goth, emo, hipster "fads" still exist and have, to a
| greater or lesser degree, been absorbed into mainstream style
| and culture. Maybe there's more to the argument than simple
| "codswallop."
| inputError wrote:
| oh so that's what 18th century cringe was
| kemayo wrote:
| I remember seeing the analogy made that "stuck a feather in his
| cap and called it macaroni" could be translated into a modern
| context as "wrote a G on his belt and called it Gucci".
| mywittyname wrote:
| Some dumb American came around
|
| driving an abomination.
|
| Clipped a tie onto his shirt
|
| and called it sophistication.
| dundercoder wrote:
| I like it.
| mbg721 wrote:
| Brooklyn hipster came to town
|
| In an '83 Mercedes,
|
| Slapped a moustache on his lip
|
| And belted out "Mmmm'ladies."
| koolba wrote:
| SV techie came to town
|
| Escaping covid lockdowns
|
| Bought up all the real estate
|
| And thinks it's Churchill Downs
| barbecue_sauce wrote:
| This seems to conflate hipsters and neckbeards.
| barbecue_sauce wrote:
| Was not expecting that to be controversial.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Brooklyn->Mmmm'ladies makes me think Beasties
| khazhoux wrote:
| In the latest taxonomy revision (spec 2020.3 SS4-12)
| you'll find that hipsters and neckbeards were re-
| classified to make the genus relationship clearer.
| khazhoux wrote:
| Oh, interesting! I'd seen the "macaroni" articles before, but
| until your comment I had not realized the song is making fun of
| the character's low-effort mimicry.
| SamBam wrote:
| It was not just the unsophisticated mimicry part, but the
| fact that he was trying to mimic something that was already
| being widely ridiculed.
|
| I'm not sure what the modern analogy would be, because I'm
| not sure what fashion is widely ridiculed. "Drew a fake
| tattoo with a ballpoint pen and called himself 90's emo goth
| kid."
| steele wrote:
| cheugy
| dang wrote:
| Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments? You've
| done it a lot, unfortunately, and we're hoping for something
| different here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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