Lewdly Sing Cuckoo

I started reading Elizabeth Janet Gray’s “Adam of the Road,” today. It’s a story of a minstrel’s son who wanders the south of England looking for his missing dog and father (apparently, in that order). It’s an okay book, a Newbery Medal-winner. But a passage from the second chapter really made me spew my chocolate milk out my nose this morning, because it reminded me of something Ridcully said in Terry Pratchett’s “Soul Music.” He was talking about music and expressed his views that it should all be folk music, “proper music with real words... 'Summer is icumen in, lewdly sing cuckoo,' that sort of thing,” he said. Then the first song from the minstrel boy’s lips in Gray’s book is that same line. Just about died laughing.