Dilly-Dally, Dalliance

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Tanya.

Hi, Tanya. Where are you?

Well, I’m actually calling right now from Xiamen, China, but I’m from Marshall, Michigan.

China. What are you doing there?

Yeah, I’m here on a work trip.

Okay. Well, that’s really cool. Well, I’m glad you took some time out to talk to us.

What’s on your mind?

That’s quite a commute.

Yeah.

The other day, it was funny, my brother, he’s 24, and he picked me up, and I was kind of taking my time, and he said, you know, stop dilly-dallying.

And I was shocked because I thought it was such an older expression that a young person would never say.

And I remembered, actually, I kind of giggled, and I said, well, dilly-dallying is one of my favorite things.

And I realized that the word had kind of came out of fashion.

And I just kind of wanted to get a little bit of background about dilly-dallying because it’s such a fun word and I really love doing it.

Yeah.

What were you doing to dilly-dally?

Were you just taking forever to get dressed?

Oh, you know, I was looking at myself in the mirror, probably searching for my keys, looking for my headphones, you know, all the stuff you do before you leave the house.

Well, it’s an example of what we call reduplication, which is when all or part of a word is repeated, sometimes with a slight sound change.

And in this case, the word that got a little bit altered is the word dally, which goes way back to an Anglo-French term, dallye, which means to chat.

And then this term to chat took on different meanings over time.

It sort of came to mean acting playfully and often flirtatiously.

And we get the word dalliance from that.

Dalliance is related to dilly-dally.

You know, you have a dalliance, just, you know, something that you don’t take too seriously.

And then dally came to mean to trifle with or to spend time frivolously, I guess, looking in the mirror and things like that.

It was elaborated on in the form of dilly-dally, which is just a little bit more, I don’t know, a little bit more sarcastic, a little more intense.

If you dilly-dally, then you’re kind of wasting time, right?

You’re just kind of taking your time and not getting where you need to be.

So it’s an example of reduplication, or if you want to be really specific about it,

It’s an example of ablout reduplication,

Which is where the two halves of the word differ only in their vowel sound,

Like zigzag and riffraff, and dilly-dally is another example of that.

Oh, yeah, I think that’s really interesting.

I never heard of that before.

I just thought it was a really fun thing to say, and I hadn’t heard it in such a long time.

All right.

Well, have fun in China and enjoy your time there.

All right.

Thank you so much.

All right.

Take care of yourself.

Call us again sometime, Tanya.

Okay.

Bye.

Bye.

If you’re wondering about a word, we’d love to chit-chat with you about it.

So don’t dilly-dally.

Call us, 877-929-9673.

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