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Symmetry and the Appeal To Both Hemispheres Of The Brain
*"Reduplication"?! What kind of word is that? "re-" means again
and "duplication" means to double or do over again. again=again.
Does that mean revert back is back=back?
Fiddle-faddle is a reduplication of fiddle.
Staircase Parallelism
Reduplication means there is an identical or nearly identical sound or spelling
or meaning in a word or phrase. Sometimes, it is identical ideas phrased in nearly the same way.
Reduplication or The (almost) Balanced Equation:
jibber-jabber, ping-pong, fiddle-faddle, splish-splash, ticky-tacky, claptrap,
killer-diller, hodgepodge, eggnog, chitchat, hokey pokey, humdrum, lucky ducky, dilly-dally, tit for tat, rich bitch, pitter-patter,
wingding, hanky-panky, razzle-dazzle, hully-gully, whippersnapper, namby-pamby, hootchy-coochy,
rinkydink, dumdum, ho-hum, correcto-mundo, Humpty Dumpty, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, hoi polloi, wheeler-dealer, fair and
square, Miss Priss, hum drum, topsy-turvy, pall mall, helter skelter, hocus pocus, pooh poohing, double-trouble, Oingo Boingo,
Spryo Gyro, funny money, nitty gritty, feast or famine, ding-a-ling, chow chow, couscous, huff and puff, mumbo jumbo, walkie-talkie,
nitwit, trick or treat, willy nilly, razzmatazz, Piggly Wiggly, meter reader, hotshot, zoot suit, chop shop, beriberi, roamin'
in the gloamin', hunky dory, mumbo jumbo, shilly shally, flip flop, hoity toity, boob tube, tomtom, putt putt, flip flops,
book nook, flower power, enormous mouse, roly-poly, hurdy gurdy, eeenie meanie miney moe, kholkhol, tisk tisk, our hour, thorough
and through, sneak a peek, fuddy duddy, prim and proper, namby pamby, wheeler dealer, fender bender, silly billy, spic 'n' span,
hurdy gurdy, roly poly, wabi sabi, "berries the size of cherries", Hokey-Pokey, Hell's Bells, hot pot, Hottentot, odds and
ends, hither and thither,
Two Sides To Every Story
Fight fire with fire
Let bygones be bygones. One or the Other Over hill and dale Here
today, gone tomorrow
I don't know, and I don't care .
Deal with the Devil.
Take the bitter with the sweet.
Be one that will not be.
Two to two and a half feet long
Two tow trucks for two town cars too
Put 2 and 2 together. 50-50 Even
steven Fair and square
2 beebees
Kissing cousins (hint: kuss and cous-)
La ilaha illa-llah
Badden Badden, Walla Walla, Kosovo,
Bergdorf ( berg= human settlement and dorf= human settlement)
plumb bob, hobnob, bedknobs and broomsticks
Berg, a Nordic name element
To fight about something is like two two boxers who fight a bout.
This is equivalent to fight=fight.
To ravage and snatch away is akin to robbing someone of a precious possession.
A rifler, a robber, is the origin of riff of riff-raff, and raff is from French verb meaning to grab at
or snatch.
The origin and meaning of riff-raff
Every
day
in
Every way
It's getting Better and Better.
In Padstow, England there is a festival which features a ritual hobby horse.
In the local dialect, it is called 'obby 'orse'. In the following paragraph about the origin of the surname Osborn,
the word Norsemen is given as 'orseman, which sounds also like horsemen and oarsmen.
There is a modern surname, Osborn, that descends from ancient origins:
"This is a medieval English surname but one of truly ancient 'Viking' origins.
The modern surname (in its many spellings) derives from the Norse personal name 'Asbiorn', composed of the elements 'As' meaning
'god' and 'Bjorn', - the bear. The Vikings, as befitted their warlike image, were very keen on names which indicated strength
and conquest. The name was found in England well before the Norman Conquest of 1066, and was also recorded in Normandy. Perhaps
this is not surprising as Normandy means 'the place of the orsemen, the 1066 Normans being the descendants of the 'land based'
Vikings ofthe 8th century, who swept down through Northern Europe" (http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Osborn).
Since the bear was a god, then to say divine bear was to say god=god.
Definition of hobby horse
Origins of the hobby horse
Merriam Webster and hobbyhorse
Hobbie is an old word that means pony and, generically speaking, hobbie-horse is the same as saying horse-horse.
The
book Norse Mythology, A Guide To The Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs by John Lindow, page 74, states that Bergelmir
means Bear-Yeller, Mountain-Yeller, or Bare-Yeller. Page 76 says that there are two interpretations for the word berserkr,
bear-shirt or bare-shirt. It's no wonder that ancient tales such as the Bare Stripping Hangman
leave you wondering. Consider also the expression "Were you born in a barn?" The name Bjorn is a familiar name and the similar Old English name Beorn both mean bear. In English, barn is a false
cognate and means a child. "Bjorn (English), Björn (Swedish, Icelandic, and
German), Bjørn (Faroese, Norwegian, and Danish), Beorn (Old English) or, rarely, Bjôrn, Biorn,
or Latinized Biornus, is a Nordic male given name, or less often a surname, meaning "bear" (the animal). In Finnish and Finland Swedish, sometimes also in Sweden Swedish, the nickname Nalle ("teddy bear") refers to Bjorn." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjorn The Old English name Boern sounds like born and barn. "Bjorn (English), Björn (Swedish and Icelandic),
Bjørn (Norwegian and Danish), Beorn (Old English) ... The Scottish word for baby is bairn. " Bairn is the Scottish form, but Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish retain
it as barn." So, were you born in a barn?
In addition to the
balanced equation in words that rhyme or almost rhyme or are in pairs with nearly the same letters or sound, there are
words that come in pairs, usually clichés, that are not equal in sound but seem to be equal partners in function such as:
thunder and lightning, bacon and eggs, beer and skittles, nuts and bolts, milk and honey, Jack and Jill, far and away, slow
but steady, fat and happy, poor but honest, piss and vinegar, macaroni and cheese, ho hum, salt of the earth, rough and ready,
man and wife, and rod and reel.
These word combinations,
somewhat like compound words, have a unique meaning together that they do not have as separate words.
They function as
balanced pairs because they put ideas in idea pairs, like a balanced yoke of oxen or team of horses. The world, as defined
in language, is put into more understandable and more manageable terms.
This way of ordering
language and thought is simple and comprehensible. That's why the clock says tick-tock, rather than tick ad
infinitum, although every tick of the clock is identical so in reality it does tick forever. The idea of a steady pair of
balanced words such as tick tock gives a different impression from thinking of the the clock as
sounding like tick infinitely in successive monotone, just as tick tock and the clock is ticking give
different ideas about time. The first word pair is reassuring in its balance. Nowdays,
there are digital clocks, but formerly there were not, and clock rhymes with tock. Originally, the way to announce the time
was by the sound of bells.
Origin of the word Clock
There are also expressions of three words, Triple Crown expressions, if you will, that have three words
together:
hickory, dickory, dock...bacon,
lettuce and tomato...red hot mama... poor little lamb...hither, thither, and yon...
Sometimes, in a
text, you will find that a word is named twice, either in another language also known by the reader or by a sound inside another
word. The Swedish word sover means sleep(s) and might have contributed to the expression "Wake me up when it's over"
and the term "sleep-over".
Another example,
a day journey is day-day, one in English and one in French.
Jour means day in French.
A different
example is in this sentence fragment, "...in his hand, and he...", which sounds something like Handy Andy.
Example of internal rhyme: Hitch up your britches. Pitch a fit Chuck that junk in the
trunk.
In Japanese, the word for butterfly is chou-chou or chocho.
In this case, the two identical sounds match the two identical wings of a buttterfly and the two halves of the brain.
It looks like a butterfly in your brain photo
gris-gris
Gragas, Icelandic law against going berserk
He paid her her due.
Live evil lives. (This is an example, not an exhortation.)
How a Scottish Gaelic name, which sounds like a completely different thing in
English and came to be called Arthur's Seat:
"There is no traditional Scottish Gaelic name but William Maitland proposed
that the name was a corruption of Àrd-na-Said, implying the "Height of Arrows", which over the years became Arthur's
Seat (perhaps via "Archer's Seat").
Many surnames with the sound of or written as Hog or Hogg
probably come from the German hoch, meaning high. In pagan Norse history, the king, priest, or ruling authority
was seated in the highest place or seat. The idea persists in our time with people equating living on a hill overlooking a
city or town as superior to the houses below, e.g. Knob Hill.
The expression "living high on the hog", then, is hog=hog, if you substitute hog
for hoch.
The name of a town called Todmorden in Yorkshire, England probably derives
"from two words for death: tod and mor (as in mort), meaning "death-death-wood"...or the name could
also mean "marshy home of the fox" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todmorden).
At Christ's resurrection, He left behind an empty tomb. In Scotland, considering
the accent, this may be a reduplication as the chiefly Scots word toom means empty, so an empty tomb or a toom
tomb is completely empty, just as in Dutch, leeg means empty or hollow, and more then a few people know what a hollow
leg is.
Speakers who are fluent in more than one
language tend to mix, match, and meld, not only the word by itself but also the elements and ideas found in the languages
stored in their brains. Here are some examples of what I mean:
In Irish the word gorm means blue. In
an Odin tale, Odin names the best of everything. This takes quite a long time, because this naming is a form of bragging,
and Odin owns the best of everything. When he gets to dogs, he names his dog Garm as the best dog ever. Obviously, gorm
and Garm sound a lot alike. That may sound like reaching, but in some tellings of the end of the world, Fenrir might
be described either as a wolf (usually) or a dog. To modern man that might be an important difference, but
the Old Norse did not necessarily demand such an important demarcation.
It is an old folk maxim that gives Old Blue as a proverbial dog
name, just as Spot. It is a good name for a hunting dog, but rarely used for a poodle.
In the book Arcade of Word
Origins by John Ayto, page 287, we read something of the origin of the word hound. "Until superseded around the
16th century by dog, hound was the main English word for 'dog' (and indeed its relatives in the other Germanic languages
remain so- German, Swedish, and Danish hund, for instance, and Dutch hond)... It goes back ultimately to Indo-European
*kuntos, a derivative of the base which also produced Greek kuon 'dog'..."
Arcade of Word Origins, John Ayoto, Arcade Publishing, Little, Brown and Company, New York, 19900
Of course, there's also the phrase hound dog, which is really dog dog, a duplication.
In Norse mythology, Garmr or Garm (Old Norse "rag") is a wolf or dog
associated with both Hel and Ragnarok, and described as a blood-stained guardian of Hel's gate.
In relatively modern times, many people used to name their dog Rags.
In Norweigian, Garm means "guards the gates of hell".
Bluetick Hound
Old Dog Blue is a folk song whose ideas may be much older than thought.
In one Norse legend, Odin goes hunting with his dogs and wears his Gorm cloak.
It may be a stretch, but a true blue may be man's best friend, the dog.
Old Dog Blue folksong
Old Dog Blue
Det är måndag idag means It is Monday today, in Swedish.
Dag means day and is pronounced like the English word dog. The letter i is pronounced
like a long "e" in English. In English, the last three syllables sound like "dog eat dog" or even "doggy dog", although the
word hund is the Germanic word usually used in Germanic based languages to say dog in modern day English.
What this might
all mean to the Swedish-English bilingual mind has never been scientifically proven, but a clock on the head might cause
some scrambling, so that the first work day of the week in the rat race, Monday, may seem like the "dog eat dog" day of the
week.
Monday was once
popularly called Blue Monday because it was the day to do the family's washing, using a substance called bluing to make
the white clothes appear whiter.
Odin's dog Gorm (Blue), was a hund not a dag.
Here's another example of homonyms in different languages: The Old English word
for wise is horsc. "Módum horsce, sagacious of mind" (http://www.bosworthtoller.com/019550).
Horse
horsc = Horse wise = horse sense.
In the Spanish
language, caballo means horse and cabello means hair, cabello de caballo, horse hair. (Is this
ever really said?) Pelo also means hair, and currently the common way to express horse hair
in Spanish is pelo de caballo, but in terms of mixing things up and reduplication, cabello de caballo could
equal horse hair.
Pelo de caballo
Cabello vs Pelo
The two
different vocabularies were eventually understood by all, but their usage indicated one's status in society. The Anglo-Saxons
were considered a lower class compared to the invading Norman French ruling class of the time.
The human brain might store a slightly different form of a word in
each hemisphere of the brain due to left and right brain function and, after passing information back and forth through
the corpus collusum, come up with a new product in phrases like horse sense. Unless you look up the word origins
or already know them, you probably won't know, for example, Old English or Old Irish words that were the foundation for expressions
we use today.
People seem to like these combinations as colloquialisms and idioms.
It may be
that running amok has basically the same meaning as going hog wild, in that they both indicate being
wildly out of control like the Norse berserkers.
List of English words with dual French and Anglo-Saxon variations
Running amok or amuck?
Wikipedia Historical and cross-cultural comparanda on amok
Irish word for pig is muc or an mhuc
In the book, The Word Museum, the definition for higgle is "to effect
by slow degrees. The poor often talk of higgling up a pig, that is of buying and fattening it up by means of small savings
[Holloway]" ( Kacirk 92).
Perhaps the only reason for the expression higgledy-piggledy is that
the word rhymes and it has to do with higgle, as in higgling up a pig. A pig is not so easy to
catch to take to market or, when greased, to wrestle, as in the expression slicker than a greased pig.
The modern meaning of higgledy-piggledy is that of confusion or disorder, as if
a herd of pigs had run hog wild through a place leaving it a real mess.
What does higgledy-piggledy mean?
Double Dactyl
Two homonyms
humerous and humerus, meaning funny and bone, could well add up to funny bone.
One meaning
of a boner is a blunder or silly mistake, which might be funny to onlookers who might make fun of you for it.
A humerous
boner is really just bone=bone.
Boner meaning mistake
You can see that "spring a leak" is a balanced expression. Both words indicate
water issuing forth.
Symmetrical Slogans:
By hook or by crook (Both are bent.)
See you later, alligator. After while, crocodile. (Later and after a while mean
the same thing and alligators and crocodiles are often confused.)
What's the word, thunderbird? (The word is Thunderbird.)
What's cookin', Good Lookin'?
Looky, looky, looky, here comes Cookie.
Children's first words and expressions are often duplications such as choo choo,
da da, ma-ma, as if both hemispheres of the brain start out on an equal footing from a blank slate, only later
to take different directions as vocabulary and experience grow, not to imply your baby's mind is or ever was a blank slate.
These words, whether joined with a hyphen or not, function like a symmetry or
a balance. Most of the words can stand alone in meaning in different contexts, but when they appear together, they have
a special appeal. Usually, there is only one letter difference, but sometimes, as in the case of tit for tat
or out and about, the middle word acts as a link, equal sign, or hyphen between the other two words
like an equal sign in an equation or a fulcrum between two sides with the potential of balance. In the case of words like
"claptrap", the hypen or equal sign is invisible like the understood "you" in a grammatical command form.
Words such as eggnog have another twist. They do not rhyme exactly,
but if you are familiar with egghead and noggin, you can see that they equal head=head.
Egghead is slang for an intellectual used by an anti-intellectual, while noggin is slang for head. It's easy to see
how a person could become confused.
What about claptrap? It's complete nonsense.
Most people are aware that when small children are taught to speak, some of
their first words are often the noises animals make, such as cats and dogs and farm animals: bow-wow, meow-meow,
quack-quack, hee-haw, oink-oink, etc. Often a child will call the animal by the sound it makes, such as calling
a cow a moo-moo. Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, twin characters from Lewis Carrol's Alice In Wonderland,
are mirror images of each other.
For reasons unknown, Pandas are often given exact duplication names such as Yang Yang and Tien Tien.
These "child words" progress into slightly different forms:
moocow, hounddog, pussycat, puppydog, beetlebug. These are words which duplicate each other, although the first part of the
compound acts also as a modifier of sorts.
How does a word like 'cat' become 'kitty-cat'?
One possibility is in the use of diminutives. The diminutive form of a word indicated
smallness or endearment.
What is a "kit"? It is the name for the young of certain animals, among them foxes. The
young of the so-called common house cat are called kittens:
"Native English Diminutives
Children's names, in English, are a good example of forming diminutives. Katherine
becomes Kathy, Edward becomes Eddie, John becomes Johnnie, Sandra becomes Sandy, Amanda becomes Mandee, Susan becomes Suzy,
and so on. The "long e" sound, whether it is spelled with an ie, y, or ee at the end of the
base of the name indicates a diminutive, wee, or baby name that is often discarded after childhood, when the process is reversed
and Kathy becomes Katherine, Eddie becomes Edward, Johnnie becomes John, Sandy becomes Sandra, and Mandee becomes Amanda,
Suzy becomes Susan, and so on.
Children seem to intuitively understand that kitty is the diminutive
for the word kitten, and in the process of reduplication the word for a house cat's offspring becomes kitty-cat.
A sweet kitten may be called a sweety.
Hypocorism or Child Talk
Consider two familiar expressions: "It takes one to know one." and "Like Father,
like son".
These are balanced expressions.
The first is equal to one=one and has the sense of "being one is knowing one".
Further reduced, the sense is "one being=one knowing" or being=knowing. It's not that far off from "I think, therefore, I
am." (Cogito ergo sum.) In use, the expression says "we are the same. Being the same, then, there is no need to
fight." Using this expression tends toward peaceful interaction and diffusing tension.
The second, "Like Father, like son" is equal to like=like and has the sense,
also, of father=son.
Share and share alike.
These, and similar expressions, seem to say "We are nearly identical" or
self=self. Used in conversation, they are conciliatory in tone , but they also might placate
both hemispheres of the brain, producing a feeling that all is balanced and, therefore, well.
Well, well, what about that?
What about an expression like "hang out outdoors"? There are two instances of
"out" sandwiched between hang and doors". You could say you were going to stay outside, play outdoors, or not come in the
house, but it doesn't have the same ring to it. "Hang doors" is an expression used by workmen meaning "to install doors
in an empty door frame".
You could also impart the same meaning in other ways, such as "recreate outside
the house", though that is seldom or never used.
Hokey Pokey
Here's an example of a balanced (almost) sentence attributed to Albert Einstein
from The Not So Big House by Sarah Susanka:
"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts
can be counted" (Susanka, 7).
Taunton Books & Videos, New Town, CT, 1998
This one is a little complicated (surprise, surprise), because he has used the word "count" twice on each side of
the equation with two different meanings for each "count" on one side of the equation and equally true on the other side of
the equation.
It's as if Albert was twice as smart as some of the rest of us.
Winkum, Blinkum and Nod: Triplets? Winkum and Blinkum rhyme alnost seem to balance. Add
the third, and the next thing you know, you've either been "taken", have fallen asleep or been hypnotized. Nod is the
thridi. The link below seems to express the same thought:
The known pair is the first link in the chain that continues with the unknown third.
Go Tell Aunt Rhodie
She died in the mill pond.
He who is uppermost is called Thridi.
Riders to The Sea - Odin
A little learning is a dangerous thing
Ok, that's all for today. Do you promise to be good from now on?
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