Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 258

Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Mobituaries: Great Lives Worth Reliving," by Mo Rocca.

 

One of the trendiest groups was the Macaronis. True, that name sounds pretty ridiculous today, but think what they’ll say in 250 years about terms like “Mac Daddy” or “Glamma.” The Macaronis earned their name from their grand tours of Italy, where they acquired a taste for Italian pasta, and also for the fashions there. These young men wore towering, ornate wigs. Sometimes they would even balance on top of these wigs a little three-cornered hat, called a chapeau bras, placed so high that it could only be reached with the point of a sword. These outlandish updos were literally the height of fashion. Macaronis naturally received their share of mockery in the London press. The word macaroni even became a synonym for “fashionable,” as in, “Those peacock green breeches are very macaroni, Sir Fopling.” If you’ve ever wondered about the seemingly nonsensical lyrics to the song “Yankee Doodle” (“Stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni”), they refer to this kind of macaroni, not the Kraft kind. A Yankee doodle dandy is a badly dressed American fool, who is being mocked for being so clueless and provincial that he puts a feather in his cap for decoration and thinks he has achieved the high style of the chapeau-wearing Macaronis. (Basically those lyrics are throwing some pretty serious nineteenth-century shade.)

She [Shirley Chisolm] made further news when she visited segregationist candidate George Wallace in the hospital after he’d been shot. Chisholm told Wallace that even though she knew she was taking a political risk, “I wouldn’t want what happened to you to happen to anyone.” Wallace broke out in tears.