Speaking of song lyrics...

If you're like me, you've often wondered what in the world Yankee Doodle has to do with macaroni. You know:

Yankee Doodle went to town, riding on a pony;
Stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni.

I always thought it was one of those things that got changed over the years through a series of misunderstandings. I was wrong. "Macaroni" is Merriam-Webster.com's word of the day today. Read on.

macaroni \mak-uh-ROH-nee\ noun
1 : pasta made from semolina and shaped in the form of slender tubes 2 *a : a member of a class of traveled young Englishmen of the late 18th and early 19th centuries who affected foreign ways b : an affected young man : fop

Example sentence: "If he...talks about London and Lord March, and White's, and Almack's, with the air of a macaroni, I don't think we need like him much the less." (William Makepeace Thackeray, The Virginians)

Did you know? As you may have suspected, the "macaroni" in the song "Yankee Doodle" is not the familiar food. The feather in Yankee Doodle's cap apparently makes him a macaroni in the now rare "fop" or "dandy" sense. The sense appears to have originated with a club established in London by a group of young, well-traveled Englishmen in the 1760s. The founders prided themselves on their appearance, sense of style, and manners, and they chose the name Macaroni Club to indicate their worldliness. Because macaroni was, at the time, a new and rather exotic food in England, the name was meant to demonstrate how stylish the club's members were. The members were themselves called "macaronis," and eventually "macaroni" became synonymous with "dandy" and "fop."

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

Now I'll be able to rest easier--one more of my life's mysteries solved.