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In case you, too, were wondering

I've watched The Sound of Music many times in my life, and I've watched the puppet show scene, in which the children yodel with marionettes, many more times than that, because it's a scene that my children and several children that I used to babysit for absolutely love. Needless to say, I can sing "The Lonely Goatherd" along with the best of them, although my yodeling isn't all it could be. I was always baffled, though, by one of the lines of the second verse:

A prince on the bridge of a castle moat heard
[yodeling]

Men in the midst of a ... tobbled hoat? heard
[yodeling]

What were the men in the midst of, again? I never knew, until it occurred to me to check google today. And the answer is: the men were in the midst of a table d'hote. Which just means they were eating at a restaurant, essentially.

I'm glad I know, now, what the men were doing. Although in a way, the wondering was a bit more interesting than the answer turned out to be.

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