Pilgrim Eye - Day

3:21AM - Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames

My copy of the nursery rhyme book arrived :-) This makes me bizarrely happy. As promised, here are the footnotes to the verse I linked to in this post.

(The following quoted from: Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames -- The d'Antin Manuscript, Discovered, Edited, and Annotated by Luis d'Antin van Rooten (1967), Penguin Books 1980, 1981.)

(The verse itself.)
Line 1: The inevitable result of a child marriage.
Line 2: The subject of this epigrammatic poem is obviously from the provinces, since a native Parisian would take this famous old market for granted.
Line 4: Since this personage bears no titles, we are led to believe that the poet writes of one of those unfortunate idiot-children that in olden days existed as a living skeleton in their family's closet. I am inclined to believe, however, that this is a fine piece of misdirection and that the poet is actually writing of some famous political prisoner, or the illegitimate offspring of some noble house. The Man in the Iron Mask, perhaps?
Lines 5,6: Another misdirection. Obviously it was not laziness that prevented this person's going out and taking himself places.
Line 8: He was obviously prevented from fulfilling his destiny, since he is compared to Gai de Reguennes. This was a young squire (to one of his uncles, a Gaillard of Normandy) who died at the tender age of twelve of a surfeit of Saracen arrows before the walls of Acre in 1191.

Here is another, briefer, example from the book:

Reine, reine, gueux éveille.
Gomme à gaine, en horreur, taie¹.

¹"Queen, Queen, arouse the rabble
Who use their girdles, horrors, as pillow slips."

The flyleaf of the book points me to a new word in its Library of Congress categorizations: Macaronic literature.

Macaronic (adj) - Characterized by a mixture of two languages.
Macaronic (n) - macaronic composition; a confused mixed-up piece of writing.

So MACARONI can be hooked twice, -C and then -S.

Incidentally, macaronism* is defined as foppishness, and macaroni as a dandy, thus the semi-nonsense reference in the folk-rhyme 'Yankee Doodle.'

(*not in TWL/OSPD, only in W3NI)

And while I have my head in the dictionary, remind me to mention the discussion we had the other day about lukewarm. Turns out -- as well as I could determine -- that etymologically speaking, lukewarm means 'warm warm.' The "luke" is derived from Old English hleow (warm), which led to Middle English lew, and is related to lee, as in 'a lee shore' or a sheltered haven.