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prettygoodwordmacaroni (mak-uh-ROH-nee) - n., pasta in the form of short tubes; a traveled young Englishman of the late 18th and early 19th centuries who affected foreign ways; any affected you man, a fop, dandy.
I didn't run this during pasta week because I wanted to include those extended senses. But regarding the pasta, in the States at least, "macaroni" is typically understood as curved, known more fully as elbow macaroni, but any short tubes are, technically, macaroni. As for the other meanings, they originated with a London club established in the 1760s by a group of Englishmen who had taken the Grand Tour on the Continent. The founders prided themselves on their appearance, fashion sense, and elegant manners -- macaroni was, at the time, a new and rather exotic food in England (though see below). Not everyone approved and as a result the fop/dandy sense was quickly spun out, and it's that sense that appears in the song "Yankee Doodle" (and was later applied to macaroni penguins). Despite the club name, the word entered English in 1390 in an older form makerouns in the oldest known recipe for macaroni and cheese. As for the Italian origin, it's a dialect form of standard Italian maccheroni, plural of maccherone, small lump of pasta, of uncertain origin -- there's a lot of speculation, but a Greek root is most commonly suggested, from makariā, barley groats in soup or sauce, especially as served at funeral meals. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
---L.
I didn't run this during pasta week because I wanted to include those extended senses. But regarding the pasta, in the States at least, "macaroni" is typically understood as curved, known more fully as elbow macaroni, but any short tubes are, technically, macaroni. As for the other meanings, they originated with a London club established in the 1760s by a group of Englishmen who had taken the Grand Tour on the Continent. The founders prided themselves on their appearance, fashion sense, and elegant manners -- macaroni was, at the time, a new and rather exotic food in England (though see below). Not everyone approved and as a result the fop/dandy sense was quickly spun out, and it's that sense that appears in the song "Yankee Doodle" (and was later applied to macaroni penguins). Despite the club name, the word entered English in 1390 in an older form makerouns in the oldest known recipe for macaroni and cheese. As for the Italian origin, it's a dialect form of standard Italian maccheroni, plural of maccherone, small lump of pasta, of uncertain origin -- there's a lot of speculation, but a Greek root is most commonly suggested, from makariā, barley groats in soup or sauce, especially as served at funeral meals. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
---L.
