Hurly-burly, helter-skelter, zigzag, shilly-shally— the hosts dish out some claptrap about words like these, otherwise known as reduplications or rhyming jingles. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Rhyming Jingles”
Hi, you have A Way with Words.
Yes, hi. This is Michelle McCaffrey calling from Colchester, Vermont.
Well, hello, Michelle. How are you doing?
Hi, Michelle.
I’m doing fine, thanks.
Yeah, I have been interested for the last several months in all of these kinds of expressions in English that we have,
Like clip-clop and boogie-woogie and fuddy-duddy and shilly-shally and zigzag, those kinds of words,
And kind of wondering where they all come from and what are they called.
Wow, that’s a tall order there.
I’ll take one of everything off the menu, please.
Hoity-toity, fuzzy-wuzzy.
What else?
Walkie-talkie, itsy-bitsy, mumbo-jumbo, hanky-panky?
They go on and on.
Yeah.
So do you lie awake and think about these things?
Well, sometimes I do.
Only the hanky-panky one.
Well, I’m interested in languages anyway, and I’m also a librarian,
So I do kind of stay awake thinking about these things.
Cool.
Well, yeah, they’re called reduplications.
Reduplications?
Yes.
Okay.
Why aren’t they just duplications?
The answer is that we got it from the Romans.
It’s their fault.
But sometimes duplicate doesn’t mean to make more than one.
It just means to do something twice.
So you’re doing a sound twice.
Okay.
That makes sense.
As far as I know, they’re the result of playfulness.
I mean, sometimes you get changes in the first consonant sound, like helter-skelter or what else?
Willy-nilly.
Help me out here, you guys.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You’re on it.
You’re on it.
Okay, I’m on it.
And then sometimes it’s a vowel alteration, right?
Like you said, zigzag and what else?
Sing song and knick-knack, that kind of thing.
I’ve also seen them described as rhyming jingles.
Rhyming jingles.
Yeah, which I kind of like.
But reduplication, I guess, is the technical term for it.
I’d never heard of that before.
And Grant, I think it’s just the result of playfulness, right?
Yeah, that’s exactly right.
We love to play with language.
We like to hear different things come off our mouths.
Do you have any children in your life, Michelle?
Anybody under the age of, say, three?
No, I don’t.
Because I think it comes natural to the brain.
My son does this.
Just he’ll hear something and have to keep saying it over and over.
His first word like that, which I think I’ve talked about on the show before, was baboon.
Baboon, you just couldn’t stop saying it.
And it’s the same with reduplication.
Rhymes and alliteration, which both feature in reduplications, are at the core, at the very core of playing with language.
Hey, Michelle, I’ve got a couple of obscure ones for you.
Okay.
You ready for some obscure reduplications?
I am.
How about, what’s the difference between a horny-dorny and a marly-scarly?
Whoa.
Are they animals?
Yes.
How did you know?
I don’t know.
It just sounded like they might be.
Man.
But I don’t know anything about them.
I’m impressed.
A horny dorney, is that a lizard of some kind?
No.
A horny dorney is a snail and a marley scarley is a caterpillar.
Oh, really?
Yes.
Yes.
And the word for caterpillar poop, by the way, is frass.
F-R-A-S-S.
I don’t know.
Thank you.
Maybe it’s frisk frass.
I don’t know.
Lucy goosey.
Anyway, Michelle, you see what you started?
Yes, I do.
My list is getting longer daily.
Well, thank you for calling this riffraff and listening to our claptrap.
We’re glad to help you out.
Thank you so much.
I hope we weren’t too wishy-washy.
No, not ronamby-bamby.
All right, bye-bye, Michelle.
Thank you.
Bye.
Take care.
Bye.
Well, break out of your hustle and bustle and your hurly-burly and your hullabaloo
And give us a call about something related to language or words or writing or literature or anything at all.
