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Be Sure to Notice the Hat
Like many young Americans, I was always puzzled by the verse in 'Yankee Doodle' that states: "Stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni."
Why would Yankee Doodle call his hat, or possibly the feather, macaroni? What similarity to curled pasta tubes could it possibly have? Perhaps he was just dotty.
But no! Apparently he was not dotty, merely exceedingly rustic. For as I have learned, a 'Macaroni' was the late 18th century name for a proto-dandy, a man so enamored of fashion as to make a complete spectacle of himself.
From wikipedia:
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'.... 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.
But more importantly, they have a picture! Check this guy out! He could stalk deer from behind that corsage!
Anyway, Yankee Doodle, being an unsophisticated colonial, felt that a mere feather in the cap was enough to make him a macaroni. The British thought this was riotously funny; the Americans thought "yes, we are a simple, honest, no-frills sort of people" and adopted the song with gusto.
No pasta involved.