Fall all de rall, &c

FOLDEROL, n. I ran across this word in Demons and Diplomacy (see below), where it is used to mean “a gewgaw, a trifle; a flimsy thing,” which is the OED’s second definition. (How long has been since I used the word “gewgaw”? Have I ever? I need to fix this.) The second definition dates from the early 19^th century.

The first definition, a hundred years older, is “as a meaningless refrain in songs.” It’s “fa la la,” basically, spelled all kinds of ways. This delighted me. Even better, the OED has a giant selection of quoted lines from what I assume are 18^th-century drinking songs? Or some of them are, anyway.

1737 I spent all my Means On Whores, Bawds and Queans; Then I got a Commission to plunder. Fall all de rall, &c.
A. Ramsay, Tea-table Miscellany vol. IV. 68

1783 With my flim flam, shall I come to you, love, Linky, lanky, there, O there; Twinkum twankum, fal lal lal de ral.
Bacchanalian Songster 53

“Flim flam,” by the way, is in the OED as both “nonsense” and “a paltry attempt at deception,” but I’m guessing it’s the former in this case. I was surprised to find an entry for “twinkum twankum,” which is, like folderol/fal lal lal de ral, a refrain from a song. I find “twinkum twankum” harder to imagine as melody than fa la la, which is maybe why one has survived so much longer than the other.

The shift from “as a meaningless refrain in songs” to “assorted decorative trinkets” makes a kind of sense. “Fall all de rall, &c” is already sort of a decorative trinket.

Not really related, but at various points while writing the above, I have ended up with Nat King Cole’s “Frim Fram Sauce” stuck in my head, as well as Serge Gainsbourg’s reggae version of the French national anthem where the singers replace the refrain with “Aux armes, et cetera,” which is, unfortunately, very funny. This is not an endorsement of Gainsbourg, a loathsome creep who once sexually harassed Whitney Houston on live television; I’m not linking that clip because it’s horrible. The talk show host fails to murder Gainsbourg on the spot. You know, so his blood could water the furrows of the fields, et cetera.

Instead I will link Whitney Houston in all her glory, because it’s always the day for that.

In small-r romance news, I’ll be chatting with authors Megan Frampton and Loretta Chase at Lovestruck Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Wednesday, August 26, at 7PM. We’re celebrating the release of Megan’s book Demons and Diplomacy and I hope you’ll join us if you can.

Here’s a little preview of the books:

Demons and Diplomacy (m/f, both cis and het, historical, fantasy) by Megan Frampton. Cora Hastings is living in a radically different version of 1851 England from the one we know: Queen Victoria has revealed herself a vampire, and consequently, in an event known as the Great Revelation, all other supernatural beings have stopped bothering to conceal themselves. One of the many consequences of this event is that social rules have been, if not completely swept away, at least knocked askew; one of Cora’s roommates is an openly queer succubus. Cora, as Species Ombudsman for Her Majesty’s Government and, generally speaking, a good girl, could never have lived with someone so disreputable before the Great Revelation, but now there are ogres and djinn in society, and no one quite knows what to do. No one, that is, except for Cora, who is practical and trying very hard to maintain the peace between the British Empire and Hell, whose ruler and entourage have come to visit for Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition. Her job is made harder by several disruptions, one being an attempt on the Devil’s life, and another being that the Devil’s son Marcellus is handsome, charming, and interested in her. Naturally, Cora and Marcellus end up working together in secret—to solve the mystery of who’s trying to kill the Devil and to solve other mysteries of a romantic nature, namely whether a human and a demon can have a happily ever after. In between chapters of the story, there are excerpts from an etiquette guide to life after the Great Revelation, which is a worldbuilding technique I love. Advance reader copy. Available on August 25.

Loretta Chase’s most recent publication is My Inconvenient Duke, but since it’s the third book in an interwoven trilogy, I thought I’d tell you about the first book. I sometimes read romance series out of order—chaos, I know!—but this one works best if you start at the beginning.

A Duke in Shining Armor (m/f, both cis and het, historical) by Loretta Chase. Lady Olympia Hightower is supposed to marry the Duke of Ashmont; Ashmont’s best friend, the Duke of Ripley, is charged with making sure the wedding goes smoothly. (Ashmont certainly can’t do it, as he’s falling-down drunk.) When the bride bolts, Ripley figures it’s his duty to go after her—to bring her back to Ashmont, of course. Certainly not to kiss her himself. Then everything that could possibly go wrong on a journey does go wrong, so Ripley and Olympia end up in rather a lot of compromising circumstances, and kissing her becomes irresistible. She’s a bespectacled rare-books nerd with her own cataloguing system, which some of us find irresistible right off the bat, but Ripley is kind of a dingdong—he gets better!—so it takes him a while to notice. Incredible hijinks, incredible detail on the 1830s dresses and underthings. Purchased as a secondhand paperback from Thriftbooks; also library audiobook.

That’s all for this time! If you come to the event at Lovestruck, please do say hello afterward.

I’m taking a couple of weeks off and will be back in your inbox on September 13.

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