macaronic

macaronic, originally, comic Latin verse form characterized by the introduction of vernacular words with appropriate but absurd Latin endings: later variants apply the same technique to modern languages. The form was first written by Tisi degli Odassi in the late 15th century and popularized by Teofilo Folengo, a dissolute Benedictine monk who applied Latin rules of form and syntax to an Italian vocabulary in his burlesque epic of chivalry, Baldus (1517; Le maccheronee, 1927–28). He described the macaronic as the literary equivalent of the Italian dish, which, in its 16th-century form, was a crude mixture of flour, butter, and cheese. The Baldus soon found imitators in Italy and France, and some macaronics were even written in mock Greek.

(Read Sir Walter Scott’s 1824 Britannica essay on chivalry.)

The outstanding British poem in this form is the Polemo-Middinia inter Vitarvam et Nebernam (published 1684), an account of a battle between two Scottish villages, in which William Drummond subjected Scots dialect to Latin grammatical rules. A modern English derivative of the macaronic pokes fun at the grammatical complexities of ancient languages taught at school, as in A.D. Godley’s illustration of declension in “Motor Bus”:

Britannica Quiz

Famous Poets and Poetic Form

Domine defende nos

Contra hos Motores Bos

(“Lord protect us from these motor buses”).

The form has survived in comic combinations of modern languages. The German–American medleys of Charles G. Leland in his Hans Breitmann’s Ballads (first published under that title in 1884) are examples of the modern macaronic, in particular his warning “To a Friend Studying German”:

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Dat all de nouns have shenders,

Und de shenders all are hard.