# Help me make sense of this song from c. 1600 ("Will you buy a fine dog...") **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [January 9, 2025, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-make-sense-of-this-song-from-c-1600-will-you-buy-a-fine-dog/1012776 "2025-01-09T22:05:12Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![HeyHomie](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/heyhomie/32/207_2.png) [@HeyHomie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HeyHomie)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2025, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-make-sense-of-this-song-from-c-1600-will-you-buy-a-fine-dog/1012776/1 "2025-01-09T22:05:12Z")
[Will you buy a fine dog? With a hole in his head? With a dildo dildo dildo…](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK7s63T1sXY) What would have been the intended audience for a song like this? I assume that one would be more likely to hear it sung by a bard at a roadside tavern, rather than in a dignified noble court. But what do I know? Also, some other questions: Were most secular (vocal) songs performed in falsetto? What does “dildo” mean here? One contributor on [Genius](https://genius.com/32559567) says that it’s a nonsense word, like “la de dee” or whatever, while another a few lines up says it’s exactly what you think it is. For whatever it’s worth, _CBS Sunday Morning_ featured this song and its liberal use of the word “dildo” as evidence that classical music was, in part anyway, a lot bawdier than how it’s thought of now. I’ll trust the credential of the latter for more than those of the former. Finally, a few centuries have separated the writer from this hearer (me). I’m assuming that, in its day, this song was a real knee-slapper – a dog with a hole in his head and a dildo sticking out! Who ever heard of such a thing?!? But the comedy ends after the first couple of lines, the rest is just kind-of stream-of-consciousness wordplay. Was there a whole genre of comedic (I guess) songs like this? ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2025, 10:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-make-sense-of-this-song-from-c-1600-will-you-buy-a-fine-dog/1012776/2 "2025-01-09T22:11:14Z")
I think it’s an example of [Lilting](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI9tIOWMK5c) ---
**Author:** ![Jaycat.again](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jaycat.again/32/11525_2.png) [@Jaycat.again](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jaycat.again)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2025, 10:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-make-sense-of-this-song-from-c-1600-will-you-buy-a-fine-dog/1012776/3 "2025-01-09T22:56:23Z")
I think it means “will you pay for the dog with a dildo (rather than money)” Or maybe, if you buy a dog with a hole in his head, they will throw in the dildo for free. ---
**Author:** ![Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/q.q.switcheroo/32/5713_2.png) [@Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Q.Q.Switcheroo)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2025, 11:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-make-sense-of-this-song-from-c-1600-will-you-buy-a-fine-dog/1012776/4 "2025-01-09T23:22:40Z")
That lines up with Wiktionary’s second definition for “dildo,” which quotes “Will you buy a fine dog” alongside other examples: > A burden: a phrase or theme that recurs at the end of a verse of a folk song. [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dildo](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dildo) ---
**Author:** ![fachverwirrt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/94ad74/32.png) [@fachverwirrt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fachverwirrt)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2025, 2:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-make-sense-of-this-song-from-c-1600-will-you-buy-a-fine-dog/1012776/5 "2025-01-10T02:13:44Z")
> [@HeyHomie](#): > > Were most secular (vocal) songs performed in falsetto? No, it just happens that this recording was made by a countertenor. ---
**Author:** ![markn\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f9ae1b/32.png) [@markn\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/markn_1)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2025, 3:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-make-sense-of-this-song-from-c-1600-will-you-buy-a-fine-dog/1012776/6 "2025-01-10T03:16:24Z")
The Oxford English Dictionary has this definition: > INTERJECTION 1. 1590–1838 > Used in songs as (part of) a refrain or other sequence of rhythmically sung syllables. Often in combination with other meaningless sounds, as la, etc. (perhaps compare instances of hey diddle, diddle at [hey _int._ 2](https://www.oed.com/dictionary/hey_int?tab=meaning_and_use#1562330)). Obsolete. The earliest quotation in this sense is from 1590. The other meaning (“an object shaped like an erect penis”) has quotations from nearly the same time (earliest 1597) but the OP’s song seems to be using the meaningless interjection sense. ---
**Author:** ![PastTense](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pasttense/32/14550_2.png) [@PastTense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PastTense)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2025, 3:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-make-sense-of-this-song-from-c-1600-will-you-buy-a-fine-dog/1012776/7 "2025-01-10T03:43:47Z")
An explanation of the song: **With a hey nonny nonny and a diddle dildo …** > A _dildo_, you might think, is a modern contraption and a word of our times — something that sprang to life with the advent of battery-operated toys and women’s lib and all that. But you would be wrong to believe that. It was alive and healthy and serving its perky purposes way back in heady Elizabethan times, and it found its way not only into the bawdy boudoirs of the 16th century, but also into the rhyme and verse of the period’s literary and musical fare. [https://glossophilia.org/2017/01/with-a-hey-nonny-nonny-and-a-diddle-dildo/](https://glossophilia.org/2017/01/with-a-hey-nonny-nonny-and-a-diddle-dildo/) **Is this 16th-century English lute song really about a sex toy? And why does the dog have a hole in its head?** [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3t2f3i/is\_this\_16thcentury\_english\_lute\_song\_really/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3t2f3i/is_this_16thcentury_english_lute_song_really/) ---
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2025, 3:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-make-sense-of-this-song-from-c-1600-will-you-buy-a-fine-dog/1012776/8 "2025-01-10T03:50:03Z")
> [@HeyHomie](#): > > For whatever it’s worth, _CBS Sunday Morning_ featured this song and its liberal use of the word “dildo” as evidence that classical music was, in part anyway, a lot bawdier than how it’s thought of now. Hell, if you want evidence for that, we have a twerking song from the 17th century that essentially contains the lyric “face down ass up that’s the way we like to fuck”. > [@](#): > > John Aubrey writes of “young wenches” indulging in a “wanton sport” called “moulding of Cocklebread” where they would “get upon a Tableboard, and as they gather-up their knees and their Coates with their hands as high as they can, and then they wabble to and fro with the Buttocks as if they were kneading of Dough with their Arses”. While doing this, the young women would sing the rhyme: > > > My dame is sick, and gone to bed. > > And I’ll go mould my cocklebread! > > Up with my heels and down with my head, > > And this is the way to mould cockle-bread. > **[Cockle bread](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockle_bread#The_%22moulding%22_of_cocklebread)** > > Cockle bread was an inferior type of British corn or wheat bread mixed with "cockle weed". In the 17th century a practice known as "moulding" cockle-bread had a sexual connotation. Cockle bread is also mentioned in a 19th-century nursery rhyme. > The play The Old Wives' Tale by George Peele, first published in 1595, has a reference to "cockle-bread". The editor of a 20th-century edition of the play, Charles Whitworth, points to the "cockle" as a weed found in corn and wheat fields, and suggests th... ---
**Author:** ![RivkahChaya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rivkahchaya/32/8919_2.png) [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2025, 10:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-make-sense-of-this-song-from-c-1600-will-you-buy-a-fine-dog/1012776/9 "2025-01-10T10:47:59Z")
Just read _The Canterbury Tales_ for many examples of how down and dirty storytelling got in the middle ages. The thing is, while the Middle Ages may have been more like now, or maybe 1990 - the present, they were followed by an era that was more like the 1950s. The Romantic age of Jane Austen was fairly prudish, which is why so many comedies of manners came out of it. But it also rediscovered the literature of the Middle Ages, that The Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment had dismissed as too, well, basically _stupid_ to have produced anything worthwhile (that’s a general statement-- some pieces from the late middle ages were “polished up” by Renaissance authors and remained in circulation). What happened in the later periods was that the bawdy stuff in medieval writings was “interpreted” as standing for other things, and meaning something else from the blatant meaning. Anything to clean up the stuff, and turn medieval writers into noble savages. But yeah, the plain, and sometimes quite disgusting, meaning is what the author intended. The Middle Ages was full of “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells,” and “Here I sit all broken-hearted…” ---
**Author:** ![I\_Love\_Me\_Vol.I](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/i_love_me_vol.i/32/521_2.png) [@I\_Love\_Me\_Vol.I](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/I_Love_Me_Vol.I)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2025, 3:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-make-sense-of-this-song-from-c-1600-will-you-buy-a-fine-dog/1012776/10 "2025-01-11T03:10:10Z")
> [@Jaycat.again](#): > > Or maybe, if you buy a dog with a hole in his head, they will throw in the dildo for free. Throw it in to the hole in the dog’s head? (“See! He can do tricks, too!”)