Yankee Doodle

The paintings are credited to Archibald Willard. Color and composition versions, oddly varied, are the contributions of the internets.

Yanker, didel, doodle down, Diddle, dudel, lanther, Yanke viver, voover vown, Botermilk und tanther.

From Wikipedia:The term Doodle first appeared in English in the early seventeenth century^[7] and is thought to be derived from the Low German (a language close to Dutch) dudel, meaning “playing music badly” or Dödel, meaning “fool” or “simpleton”. The Macaroni wig was an extreme fashion in the 1770s and became contemporary slang for foppishness.^[8] Dandies were men who placed particular importance upon physical appearance, refined language, and leisure hobbies. A self-made “Dandy” was a British middle-class man from the late 18th to early 19th century who impersonated an aristocratic lifestyle. They notably wore silk strip cloth, stuck feathers in their hats, and bore two fob watch accessories simultaneously (two pocket watches with chains)—”one to tell what time it was and the other to tell what time it was not”.^[9] This era was the height of “dandyism” in London, when men wore striped silks upon their return from the Grand Tour^{[citation needed]}, along with a feather in the hat.

The macaroni wig was an extreme example of such dandyism, popular in England at the time. The term macaroni was used to describe a fashionable man who dressed and spoke in an outlandishly affected and effeminate manner. The term pejoratively referred to a man who “exceeded the ordinary bounds of fashion”^[10] in terms of clothes, fastidious eating, and gambling.

In British conversation, the term “Yankee Doodle Dandy” implied unsophisticated misappropriation of high-class fashion, as though simply sticking a feather in one’s cap would make one to be noble.^[11] Peter McNeil, professor of fashion studies, claims that the British were insinuating that the colonists were low-class men lacking masculinity, emphasizing that the American men were womanly.^[12]