An explanation of why Yankee Doodle called the feather in his hat “Macaroni”. Both the line and the song have more historical context than many people may realize.
Most of us sing “Yankee Doodle” with a focus on the tune rather than the apparently gibberish words:
Yankee Doodle went to town
A-riding on a pony,
Stuck a feather in his cap
And called it macaroni.
To a kid, the macaroni at the end makes it sound like Yankee Doodle was an ignoramus who didn’t know what mac and cheese was. But a kid doesn’t know a couple of key things about the song, including that:
- The whole thing was written to insult Americans
- The real meaning of macaroni is a multilayered insult for the ages
“Yankee Doodle” had many different versions, but we know it was sung by British officers before and during the Revolutionary War. And a macaroni was actually a specific type of person — the type of person to be mocked.
“Macaroni referred both to particular short-lived fashion for men in the early 1700s and to a certain kind of man,” professor Kate Haulman writes in The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America. “Often derisive, the term applied to elaborately powdered, ruffled, and corseted men of fashion, successors to the Restoration era fops and predecessors to the nineteenth century dandy.”
