Even the most serious-minded businessperson will occasionally set aside talk of deliverables and verticals in favor of getting down to the nitty-gritty. Paul Rudd inspired a new slang term in 2009's "I Love You, Man" when he said "totes magotes." Any bar that plays classic rock will eventually get around to Lynyrd Skynyrd and perhaps something from the Rolling Stones' "Get Your Ya-yas Out." We all get the heebie-jeebies or whim-whams sometimes. When a football player is called for a foul that seems like a minor offense, announcers call it ticky-tack. Moses," which contains the line "Crisis, schmisis!" "Schm" reduplication is one of the most versatile processes in English: You can do it to just about any word, from "Pumpkin spice, schmumpkin schmice!" to "Universe, smchmuniverse!"ĭespite these patterns, you can find reduplicative words in just about every corner of English. Rather than intensify by the reduplication, the 'Yiddish' addition actually undermines mocks the first part." This evolved from the many Yiddish words that depreciate someone or something, like "schmuck," "schmo," "schmutz," and "schmaltz." The first known example is from Isak Goller's 1929 novel "The Five Books of Mr. Jonathon Green - editor of the largest English language slang dictionary in the world, "Green's Dictionary of Slang" - sees "schm" reduplication as quite different: "I think, rightly or wrongly, that synergy-schmynergy etc. Windsor dissent was so withering: 'legalistic argle-bargle' makes the deliberations of the Court seem like fruitless faffing." That's why Antonin Scalia's use of 'argle-bargle' in the United States v. You're highlighting the littleness of the action - it's so unimportant that you can make a childlike rhyme out of it. Barking 'Quit dallying and get in here' gets the point across, but saying 'Quit dilly-dallying and get in here' adds an extra dash of contempt to your command. They seem very childish, but the motivation behind creating and using them can be really nuanced. In an e-mail interview, Kory Stamper, an associate editor at Merriam-Webster, said, "The first thing that comes to mind when talking about reduplicatives is the force behind them. "Phony baloney" sounds like twice the baloney, and even reduplicative terms that are half nonsense create a kind of emphasis. That led to "phonus balonus," a silly Latin-sounding variation. When "baloney" starting referring to bunk and rubbish around 1920, it wasn't long before the reduplicative term "phony baloney" popped up. There are also rarer nonsense-describing terms such as "ackamarackus," "flubdub," "twittle-twattle," and "skimble-skamble," which was used by Shakespeare. "Fiddle-faddle" and "jibber-jabber" are also common, the latter thanks to Mr. These days, it tends to refer to gobbledygook (not quite a reduplicative, but almost). The most famous is probably "mumbo jumbo," which originally referred to superstitious nonsense back in the 1700s. The language of BS and nonsense is also full of reduplicates - maybe because the words themselves sound so nonsensical. Once in school, it's not long before kids learn to taunt each other with "Nyah nyah!" or the double reduplication "Nanny nanny boo boo!" I probably don't need to mention the prominence of "pee-pee" and "poo-poo" in a child's vocabulary and a parent's life. Just about all rugrats read about Humpty Dumpty, and "gee-gee" is a child's word for a horse from the 1800s. The original might be "Mama!" Anyone with a baby likely uses terms such as "choo-choo," "no-no," and "night-night." Infantile reduplication runs the gamut from good things ("Would you like your ba-ba?") to bad things ("Do you have a boo-boo?"). These reduplicates mimic the way children learn language. Reduplicative terms appear all over English but are prominent in a few areas, like the language of childhood and anything cutesy-wutesy. Grant Barrett, host of the public radio show "A Way with Words," notes via e-mail that even the word "reduplication" has an unnecessary frill: "I've always liked the 're' in 'reduplicate.' We're doing it again! It's right there in the word!" My favorite type is "schm" reduplication, though some might say "Favorite, schmavorite!" All the types show that redundancy isn't a problem in word-making. Reduplication doesn't get any simpler than when the whole word is repeated, like when you pooh-pooh a couple's attempt to dress matchy-matchy. One type replaces a vowel while keeping the initial consonant, as in "flip-flop," "pish-posh," and "ping-pong." Another type keeps the vowel but replaces that first sound, as in "namby-pamby," "hanky-panky," "razzle-dazzle," and "timey-wimey," a word used by Dr. There are several kinds of reduplication.
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