Dictionary

macaronicism en · NOUN

Etymology

From macaronic + -ism.

Meanings

1. (countable, rhetoric, uncountable) The use of macaronic language; The mixing of two or more languages in a single work.
   • Readers of seventeenth-century Polish texts— from baroque poetry through polemical pamphlets to forensic prose—are used to deciphering Polish-Latin macaronicisms. 2013, David A. Frick, Kith, Kin, and Neighbors:
   • Klymasz argues that macaronicism is a comic device in The Street Where I Live, but he stops short of discussing the ways Haas uses macaronic humour to undermine the dominance of Anglo-Canadian culture. 2005, Lisa Grekul, Leaving Shadows: Literature in English by Canada's Ukrainians:
   • The playfulness of macaronicism may have been another contributory factor: Omnegatherum, that is to say, may be a self-deprecating acknowledgement of the impossibility of the encyclopaedic dream and the inability of any compiler or miscellanist to contain a total body of knowledge within the bounds of a single book. 2018, Angus Vine, Miscellaneous Order:
   • Before quitting this division of macaronicism, we must not forget the amusing specimen given by Molière in the troisième intermede of Le Malade Imaginaire , where Argan the invalid is to be admitted a doctor . 1831, William Sandys, Specimens of Macaronic Poetry, page xv:

Forms