http://wordie.org/words/folderol Comments for the word 'Folderol' http://wordie.org http://wordie.org/words/folderol#comments From before Shakespeare's "There was a lover and his lass, / With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonny no", right down to the present day, nonsense words have been a regular feature of song lyrics. You might think that it's a stretch to suggest another meaningless la-la lyric filler is the origin of this usefully dismissive word. However, that indeed seems to be its origin, although the usual form until relatively recently was falderal rather than folderol. <br />There are many traditional rhymes and songs with variants of "fal-de-ral" in them somewhere. For example, Robert Bell noted these words of an old Yorkshire mummer's play in his Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry Of England of 1857: "I hope you'll prove kind with your money and beer, / We shall come no more near you until the next year. /Fal de ral, lal de lal, etc." And Sir Walter Scott included a few lines of an old Scottish ballad in The Bride of Lammermoor (1819): "There was a haggis in Dunbar, / Fal de ral, etc. / Mony better and few waur, / Fal de ral, etc." Charles Dickens had gentle fun with this habit in his Sketches By Boz of 1836-7: "Smuggins, after a considerable quantity of coughing by way of symphony, and a most facetious sniff or two, which afford general delight, sings a comic song, with a fal-de-ral — tol-de-ral chorus at the end of every verse, much longer than the verse itself." <br /> <br />It was around 1820 that this traditional chorus is first recorded as a term for a gewgaw or flimsy thing that was showy but of no value, though it had to wait until the 1870s before it started to be widely used. <br />(from <a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/">World Wide Words</a>) Tue, 27 May 2008 17:17:30 +0000 http://wordie.org/words/folderol#comments