this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2024
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Fire Memes for Traitor Haters

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Where we meme (joking in tone and detail, serious in sentiment) about General Sherman, the Civil War, and how the secesh traitors had it coming.

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[โ€“] Trex202@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[โ€“] PugJesus@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

It's an old 19th century joke that Grant is noted to have told about himself. It's a self-depreciating joke that implies that the speaker has very little musical ability or knowledge, being restricted to being able to recognize, reproduce, or follow along with [song name], and regarding all the rest as interchangeable or unreproducible. In this context, it's meant to depreciate Grant's own musical tastes as simple, undiscerning, or nonexistent (Yankee Doodle, of course, being a patriotic song and a very commonly heard one, and thus exempted from disinterest or unfamiliarity).

Sherman backs this claim of Grant's lack of musicality - he said he himself knew only two tunes (Yankee Doodle and Marching Through Georgia), but that was "two more [tunes] than Grant"