Macaroni Men and Eighteenth-Century Fashion Culture - 'The Vulgar Tongue'

In 1823 when this term was included in Pierce Egan’s new edition of Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), ‘macaroni’ had been circulating in the English language for sixty years, denoting a species of foppish man.2 It was a term mainly used between 1760 and 1780, but was still in everyday use in 1795, when a verse described men shopping in the spa town of Bath thus: ‘booted and spur’d, the gay macaronies, Bestride Mandell’s counter, instead of their ponies’.3 The word continues to echo on a daily basis within the refrain of the famous patriotic tune Yankee Doodle (published 1767), referring to the appearance of troops during the French and Indian War (or the ‘Seven Years War’, 1754–63