(Warning: lots of off-color word play about male masturbation)
To celebrate American independence (year 246), the Fort Troff company (“Ruff Stuff for Pig Sluts”), purveyor of sex accessories, primarily to guys like me), offers this (parodic) slogan:
Yankee Doodle keep it up / Yank your doodle dandy
The verb yank ‘masturbate’ is only accidentally homophonous with the yank– of Yankee, but according to GDoS, the noun doodle ‘penis, esp. a child’s penis’ is attested from the 18th century on.
The first verse and chorus of the original:
Yankee Doodle went to town
A-riding on a pony,
Stuck a feather in his cap
And called it macaroni.[chorus]
Yankee Doodle keep it up,
Yankee Doodle dandy,
Mind the music and the step,
And with the girls be handy.
As for the music, I took on revolutionary music in general, here, with references to music from various revolutions, including music by William Billings (for our own Revolution), and “Yankee Doodle”:
I don’t seem to have a “straight” version [of “Yankee Doodle”] on my iTunes, though I do have two wonderfully over-the-top versions, Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s “The Union” (Op. 48), a concert paraphrase (for the piano) “on the national airs Star Spangled Banner, Yankee Doodle, and Hail Columbia” (played by Cecile Licad), and Henri Vieuxtemps’s “Souvenir d’Amérique — Variations burlesques sur Yankee Doodle” (Op. 17), for an unhinged violinist (Joshua Bell, in this case).
But I haven’t touched the words on this blog. There is, however, a rich vein of crude parody song lyrics. For example, from the song parody site Am I Right, “Yank and Diddle” by Rick Duncan, an anti-Catholic slur parody that begins:
Catholic priest from my home town
Looking for diversion
Stuck an altar boy one day
I think that’s called perversion[chorus]
Yank and Diddle, keep it up
Lure them in with candy
Mind the local cops and press
And use whoever’s handy
Lexicography. GDoS on the verb diddle:
(orig. US) ‘to masturbate oneself or another’ [cites from c. 1915-20 on, with diddlers of both sexes]
And then, on the masturbatory verb. From GDoS on the verb yank-1:
.. 4 to masturbate [full set of cites:]
1970 San Diego Sailor: It finally got so I’d have to yank every so often to get rid of my load.
1978 Larry Kramer Faggots: [He] yanked his full-grown penis to a gigantically pleasurable orgasm.
2000 Ferdia Mac Anna Cartoon City: Just kissing and a spot of groping, followed by some yanking and a bit of caressing.
Plus: yank off, yank one’s / someone’s / the crank, yank one’s meat, yank the plank. Notably in:
1919 transcript of the Foster Inquiry in L.R. Murphy, Perverts by Official Order [on the U.S. Navy’s use of entrapment in pursuit of homosexuals in and around Newport RI during the early 20th century] (1989): I might have what they call, yanked someone off …
On to Tom Lehrer. Having an absurdly allusive mind, I was led from the dactylic verb masturbate to the dactylic verb plagiarize, and so to the comic delight of Tom Lehrer’s “Lobachevsky” (aka “Plagiarize”), which I then proceeded to degrade:
Masturbate
Let no one make you hesitate
Remember why the good Lord made that sex so great
So don’t procrastinate
But ejaculate, ejaculate, ejaculate
Only be sure always to call it please “recreation”
The original first verse, with its lead-in:
I am never forget the day
I first meet the great Lobachevsky
In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics:
PlagiarizePlagiarize
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes
So don’t shade your eyes
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize
Only be sure always to call it please “research”
About the song, from Wikipedia:
“Lobachevsky” is a humorous song by Tom Lehrer, referring to the mathematician Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky. According to Lehrer, the song is “not intended as a slur on [Lobachevsky’s] character” and the name was chosen “solely for prosodic reasons”.
In the introduction, Lehrer describes the song as an adaptation of a routine that Danny Kaye did to honor the Russian actor Constantin Stanislavski. (The Danny Kaye routine is sung from the perspective of a famous Russian actor who learns and applies Stanislavski’s secret to method acting: “Suffer.”) Lehrer sings the song from the point of view of an eminent Russian mathematician who learns from Lobachevsky that plagiarism is the secret of success in mathematics (“only be sure always to call it please ‘research'”). The narrator later uses this strategy to get a paper published ahead of a rival, then to write a book and earn a fortune selling the movie rights.
… The song was first performed as part of The Physical Revue, a 1951–1952 musical revue by Lehrer and a few other professors. [and was then recorded in various versions over the years]
You can listen to one of these recordings here.
Further horizons. It appears that I haven’t yet taken advantage of the dactylic nature of masturbate to compose a double dactyl, beginning with the nonsense syllables diddily daddily (throwing in a daddy – boy allusion) and incorporating the doubly dactylic word masturbatorily. Now to yank something out.