RANTIPOLE results

[James Kushner]

>rantipole, adj. Disagreeable; pugnacious.
>
>    Though they fight with ill grace for a popular place
>       At a theatre or concert or races,
>    Though rantipole blades sneer at blighted old maids,
>       And puff bad cigars in their faces,
>    Though they cover with shame any elderly dame,
>       Who elicits unkind observations,
>    How they twist and they twirl to a pretty young girl!
>       It's by far the politest of nations!
>
>    --Bab (W.S. Gilbert), "The Politest of Nations!" (1869)
>
>JAMES
>
>Linda - "Did G&S really write this?  I have not had the pleasure
>  of hearing more than 4 or 5 of their operettas."

It's not Gilbert & Sullivan, but it is Gilbert. It's one of the "Bab
Ballads", which were pieces of comic verse submitted by Gilbert to many of
the comic magazines of the day. He signed them "Bab", which was also (and
primarily) the name he signed to his comic drawings.

Many of the Bab ballads are well-known and anthologized (the best-known is
probably "Etiquette"), and the full lot of them are collected in an edition
from the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, edited by James Ellis.
(My edition is dated 1980, but the first HUP edition may have been 1970.)

Incidentally, in the above stanza, "rollicking" should be substituted for
"rantipole" to re-create the original.

--James

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Keep Thirty!
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James Kushner
Sarasota, FL