Might the jingle be a very old thing, pre-dating radio and television? Here is Bakhtin trying to explain the type of orality featured in Rabelais through the medieval and early modern cris, or street cries:
“The cris were loud advertisements called out by the Paris street vendors, and composed according to a certain versified form; each cry had four lines offering and praising a certain merchandise…We must recall that not only was all advertising oral and loud in those days, actually a cry, but that all announcements, orders, and laws were made in this loud oral form…This fact should not be ignored when studying the style of the sixteenth century and especially the style of Rabelais” (The Bakhtin Reader, 218).
Like the street vendor, Rabelais in his authorial introductions is loud and boastful, as quick to praise the (wise) reader who has bought his book as condemn the (stupid) reader who has not. “Shit on them,” as Rabelais says. Can you imagine Mary Higgins Clark saying such a thing? I can’t.
