Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star

The words of the first parody of the song, which remains best known to French children even today.

Perhaps the best-known French melody in the English-speaking world, if not the whole world, is a French pastoral song, the melody of which dates to 1740. The tune became popular, and was first published with suggested lyrics in 1761, linked to a love poem called “La confidence” (“The Confidence”, in English). The first verse went like this:

Ah! Vous dirai-je Maman

Ce qui cause mon tourment?

Depuis que j’ai vu Clitandre,

Me regarder d’un air tendre ;

Mon cœur dit à chaque instant,

«Peut-on vivre sans amant?»

In English, it reads like this:

Ah! Shall I tell you, Mama,

What just drives me crazy?

Since I saw Clitandre

Look at me in that tender way,

My heart said at that instant,

“Can you live without loving?”

In case that doesn’t ring any bells, don’t sweat it. “La confidence” is not especially well remembered today, and I’m probably one of the few people who have ever tried to translate it into English. (I’m not bragging about that. It’s not the most complicated piece, to say the least.) Oddly, it was not the original but a parody of the original that caught on, and is still a popular children’s song in France today:

Ah! Vous dirai-je Maman,

Ce qui cause mon tourment?

Papa veut que je raisonne

Comme une grande personne.

Moi, je dis que les bonbons

Valent mieux que la raison.

In English:

Ah! Shall I tell you, Mama,

What just drives me crazy?

Papa wants that I be reasonable,

Like a grown-up.

Me, I say that candy

Is worth more than reason.

It loses something in the translation, no doubt. The funny part was that the parody was published as “La confidence naïve”, or “The Naïve Confidence”, turning a heartfelt poem about a young woman trying to sort out her love life into a child complaining to his mother about how his father keeps asking him to grow up already. The connection to the original lyrics is probably lost on modern French children and even modern French adults, but it must have gotten a good laugh in the 1760s.

This song achieved international attention in 1785, when a 29-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart published his “Twelve Variations on ‘Ah! Vous dirai-je Maman!”. Mozart was probably exposed to the song while staying in Paris a few years earlier.

By 1806, the tune found its way to England, and poet Jane Taylor wrote five verses of a poem called “The Star”, which were no doubt designed to fit this tune:

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,

How I wonder what you are!

Up above the world so high,

Like a diamond in the sky.

Soon after, “The Alphabet Song” and “Baa Baa Black Sheep” were also fitted to the melody. The German Christmas carol “Morgen Kommt der Weihnachtsmann” uses it as well, as do songs in Spanish, Dutch, Turkish and Hungarian. “The Alphabet Song” was copyrighted in the United States in 1835, featuring Noah Webster’s newly promoted pronunciation of the final letter, Z, as “zee” instead of “zed”. Webster’s idea was that the simplified pronunciation was more intuitive, and thus promoted literacy better. Whether that was true or not, it sure lent itself to the rhyme scheme better than the traditional pronunciation.

The song has been parodied in English a number of times. Lewis Carroll’s famous “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat” debuted in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” in 1865 and is still one of the best-known parodies, but there have been others. Here are a few:

“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat” performed by Robert Helpmann in the film “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, 1972:

“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Earth” by Leonard Nimoy:

A jazzy “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” by Alvin and the Chipmunks:

Science Groove gets a little more technical with “Twinkle, Twinkle, T2*”:

“Twelve Variations on ‘Ah! Vous dirai-je Maman” by Mozart:

And here’s the original parody of “Ah! Vous dirai-je Maman!”:

This is by no means a definitive list of versions and parodies. The song’s been around for about a quarter of a millennium. A lot can be done over that much time, so have a look around—I’m sure you’ll find more!

How the Lemon was Invented

Lemons How do you make a lemon? Silly question, isn’t it? You just take the seeds out of one and plant them, and wait for the tree to come up, right? That’s true, but it hasn’t always been that easy. Lemons today are a widely cultivated citrus fruit, with a flavor used in cuisines of countries where no lemon tree would ever grow. You might think that it was just a matter of ancient peoples finding the trees, enjoying their fruit and growing more of them, but that’s not true. The lemon is a human invention that’s maybe only a few thousand years old. The first lemons came from East Asia, possibly southern China or Burma. (These days, some prefer to refer to Burma as Myanmar . I’ll try to stay out of that controversy here and stick to fruit.) The exact date of the lemon’s first cultivation is not known, but scientists figure it’s been around for more than 4,000 years. The lemon is a cross breed of several fruits. One f...

Origins of the Word Hoser, eh?

Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as cultural icons Bob and Doug McKenzie These days we often hear Canadians referred to as “Hosers”. It’s a strange word, and it sounds a little insulting, but it’s sometimes used more with affection than malice. Any such word is difficult to use correctly, especially if you don’t belong to the group the word describes. I can’t say I feel comfortable throwing the word around, myself, but I can offer a little information about it that might shed some light on what it means. First off: is it an insult? Yes… and no. The word hoser can be used as an insult or as a term of endearment; the variation hosehead , is certainly an insult. It’s a mild insult, meaning something like jerk or idiot or loser . Its origin is unclear, and there are several debatable etymologies of the word. One claims that it comes from the days before the zamboni was invented, when the losing team of an outdoor ice hockey game...

The Whoopie Cap

What can you do with your father’s old hats? If you were born after, say, 1955, the answer is probably “Not much.” Men were still wearing fedoras in the 1970s and 1980s, but by 1990, fashion had turned to the point where unless you were Indiana Jones, the hat didn’t look right. Some blame Jack Kennedy for starting it all, strutting around perfectly coiffed and bare-headed in the early 1960s. In 1953, Harry Truman, a haberdasher by trade, stepped out of office, and just eight years later we had a president who didn’t care for hats? The times, they were a-changin’. If you set the WABAC machine to the 1920s or 1930s (when Indiana Jones was supposed to have lived), you would see the fedora was still very much in style. Men just didn’t leave the house without a hat of some kind, and for what remained of the middle class, the fedora was the topper of choice. But like any other piece of clothing, hats wear out, too. When that happened, you’d ju...

Search This Blog