“Unraveling the Mystery: Why Uncle Sam Really Calls Americans ‘Yankees’—The Surprising History You Never Knew!”
A slightly more familiar version to those of us today is also one of the earlier known versions, generally credited to Harvard sophomore and American Minuteman Edward Bangs:
Father and I went down to camp,
Along with Captain Gooding,
And there we saw the men and boys
As thick as hasty pudding.
Yankee Doodle keep it up,
Yankee Doodle dandy,
Mind the music and the step,
And with the girls be handy
Continuing to turn the lyrics around, with the colonists variously either taking pride in the song and/or directly mocking the British, we have lyrics like
Yankee Doodle is the tune
That we all delight in;
It suits for feasts, it suits for fun,
And just as well for fightin’.
Historians aren’t completely sure when the verse about sticking “a feather in his hat and calling it macaroni” came to be. The oldest known print version of this didn’t appear until all the way in 1842, published in London in the book The Nursery Rhymes of England by James Orchard Halliwell, though this particular lyric is obviously thought to date back to the American Revolution, partially due to the term being used here, which dates it somewhat, and how mocking the use of it was.
Stepping back a little to a term related to “macaroni,” there’s an interesting side tale about the evolution of the word “doodle” to one that’s more used today – “dude.” According to esteemed etymologists Barry Popik and Gerald Cohen, “dude” was first used in the 1880s as a way to describe young New York City men who had an affinity for being flamboyantly well-dressed, well-manicured and overly pretentious – in other words, a “dandy.” Using the very words that were used to mock colonists a hundred years earlier – “doodle dandy” – people started to call these 19th century men that as well, as a means to essentially call them pretentious fools. Later, this got shortened to “doodles,” then to “doods.” Eventually, the spelling was changed to “dude.” (And if you’re curious, the original female equivalent was dudine.)
