Sorry I Brought It Up!

Yankee Doodle--yeah, yeah, I'll call him macaroni.

It all started innocently. It's flu season, or at least it's the season in which ads for hand-washing abound. It all reminded me of some story or other I read or heard a couple of years ago, that most people don't wash their hands for a long enough time period to kill germs. According to this story, you're supposed to lather up and then rub your hands together (paying attention to fingers and nails and whatnot) for the length of time it takes to sing one verse and the chorus of "Yankee Doodle."

It occurred to me that, just as Uncle Sam has no real equivalent up here, neither does Yankee Doodle. Military bagpipers have many Scottish tunes at the ready, and they also pipe "Maple Leaf Forever," but it's a sentimental song, not a saucy one. Roy claims "Aloutte" counts, because it is sung in French Canada and English Canada and was a song of the voyageurs, designed to keep that paddle going. However, it wasn't a song of national identity, so it was a nice try, but no. (He also thinks that Canadians, not being saucy, of course wouldn't have an equivalent of Yankee Doodle, but this isn't his blog.)

Of course, then Roy had to find out more about the song, and now I am, as the title of this post says, sorry I brought it up in the first place. If you're interested, you can read the Wikipedia entry here. If you're a masochist, you can hear variations on the theme at the bottom of that entry. Seriously--it's one of the more annoying songs, no matter how you vary its tune. (It's a lovely version, well played.) You can even find out about that whole "macaroni" thing.

However, the part of the story that I found most interesting is also the part I find typically American, and I'm sorry I can't find the web site where all this came from. "Yankee" is apparently a corruption of a Dutch diminutive for "John" that you could roughly translate to late-20th-century pop culture as "Gomer." "Doodle," in early colonial times, meant roughly "numbskull," "nitwit," or something even less kind. We'll call it "Doofus." So when the Terribly Proper British sang about Yankee Doodle, it was the equivalent of calling colonials in the Americas "Gomer Doofus."

In other words, they weren't complimenting colonial Americans. Not even close.

Yet, those wacky Americans--typically, they welcomed Yankee Doodle with open arms, and I mean both the song and the identity. (It's still the state song of Connecticut.) A Canadian--possibly one of the descendants of those Terribly Proper British who meant to jeer--could conceivably claim that Americans stole Yankee Doodle and then corrupted it for their own purposes.

As was the case with so much else.

Bet you can't stop whistling it now, can you? (Argh.)