Mark​​​​ Canada, Ph.D.​

What's your favorite word? Wait, doesn't everyone have a favorite word?  I have several, but then language is a hobby, a vocation, maybe even a little bit of an obsession with me.

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I have a soft spot for Byzantine (a perfect word for the kind of crazy complexity that I find maddening in, among other things, U.S. tax policy) and other words, but the word at the top of my list of favorites is . . .

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walkie-talkie.

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The word is so common that most English speakers probably say it without thinking much about its makeup.  For me, the -ie ending is part of the fun.  In English, the "long e" sound on the ends of words is considered a diminutive, something that we add to words for things small, cute, or endearing, especially items for children, as in the case of "blankie" for "blanket," for example.  Walkie-talkies are fairly small (although not especially cute or endearing), but the diminutive on the ends of "walk" and "talk" put a fun little spin on the word.  An even bigger part of the appeal, however, is the rhyme, especially because the two rhyming words perfectly capture the use of the thing itself: We can walk and talk at the same time--what a novelty!  (Well, it doesn't seem so special now that we have cell phones, I suppose, but walkie-talkies have been around a lot longer.  They were used in World War II.) I'm not the only person who enjoys this word, by the way.  Check out comedian Brian Regan's take on it.

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Would you believe that linguists have a term for this kind of word?  We call it a reduplicative, and English has scores of examples: mumbo jumbo, hurdy-gurdy, namby-pamby, mishmash, and many more.  Like walkie-talkie, all of these words rhyme, but reduplicatives also include shilly-shally, gew-gaw, and flim-flam, which don't rhyme.  What's the common characteristic?

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All of these words have two parts that are identical except for one sound.  They are virtually duplicated. (The term strikes me as redundant, since "re-" means again, but the sounds are duplicated only once.  Maybe I just think too much about words.)  If the codas (or final sounds) are identical, the words rhyme.  If the vowels are different, the words don't rhyme, but demonstrate something called consonance.  Still other reduplicatives, such as goody-goody and pooh-pooh, consist of identical parts.

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What are we to say about reduplicatives?  Well, if you ask me, we don't have to say anything other than the words themselves, since they are just so much fun, but what makes them fun?

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I will hazard a few guesses.  First, we speakers of Modern English tend to enjoy rhyme.  I specified "Modern English" because speakers of Old English (spoken before the Norman Conquest in 1066) actually preferred alliteration (repetition of initial sounds, as in firum and foldan in Caedmon's Hymn), but that's a subject for another column.  This thought only begs another question, though.  What is it about rhyme that we find appealing?  I believe the appeal has to do with expectation and satisfaction.  So much of our lives are filled with disappointment.  Rhyme--exact rhyme, to be, well, exact--sets up an expectation and then fulfills it.  That feels good, I think.  (I'll have more to say about rhyme in a future column.  There's actually a lot more to rhyme than meets the ear.)

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Consonance is less satisfying to the modern English ear, I think, but it does follow a pattern, and patterns have structure, and structure is appealing in a largely disorderly world. 

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On a related note, all reduplicatives have a contrived ring to them, since they follow a pattern.  They feel made up in a way that most English words do not.  Depending on how you count, English has hundreds of thousands or even millions of words, and the vast majority of the everyday ones simply emerged on their own in ways that probably will always remain mysterious to us.  Why do we say, for example, "good"?  We can trace it back to earlier forms of English, back to Germanic languages, even back to Proto-Indo-European, but we probably will never know why those three sounds originally meant "good." 

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Reduplicatives are different.  Because they sound made up, there is something fun about them.  We hear a human being playing with language, and we enjoy getting in on the fun.

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Finally, because of their sound patterns, reduplicatives are more memorable than most other English words.  When I was a kid, my dad worked a lot with me on my baseball skills.  I vividly recall that he critiqued my pitching motion as "herky-jerky."  Now, if he had simply said my motion was awkward, I would not remember it, but herky-jerky is a downright delightful word.  Maybe it even took some of the sting out of Dad's constructive criticism.  If someone says a house gave her the heebie-jeebies or complains that her boss was wishy-washy or recalls that her ragtag dogs were running around the yard higgledy-piggedly (or helter-skelter or pell-mell), you probably will remember those words, too.  Just don't ask her to show you her hodgepodge of knickknacks and gewgaws.  (I don't think anything will ever replace walkie-talkie at the top of my list of favorite words, but, gosh, heebie-jebbies is a beaut.)

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The memorability and sense of fun that comes with reduplicatives may explain why they sometimes crop up in brand names.  I mean let's face it, if you're going to have a party, doesn't it seem as if some Fiddle Faddle would make it more fun?  Head over to the Piggly Wiggly and pick some up, and while you're at it, go ahead and get some Nutty Buddy and Nutter Butter treats to go with it.  Make sure to put up some selfies on TikTok.  Maybe you and your friends will play some Ping Pong.  (Yes, it's a brand name; the general term is the more mundane "table tennis," which has the appeal of being alliterative, but just cannot stack up to "Ping Pong," which has the extra appeal of being onomatopoeic--that is, it the words make sounds similar to the sounds the word represents, in this case the sounds of the ball pinging and ponging on the table.)

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When I worked at Chick-fil-A as a teenager, we pressure-cooked the chicken in a large contraption called a Henny Penny.  Now, if it had been called, say, a PC 1000, do you think I would remember it?  By the way, do you recognize "Henny Penny"?  She's a character in the story now commonly known as the story of Chicken Little, the one in which various animal characters, including Cocky-locky and Turkey-lurkey, head off to tell the king that the sky is falling--and who takes advantage of this situation?  That would be Foxy-woxy.

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Are you enjoying these reduplicatives as much as I am?  Well, that's probably not possible, but I'll bet you find them fun.  That's the nature of this kind of word.  In fact, it's probably no accident that we never use reduplicatives for serious subjects.  Has your mortgage officer ever spoken of escrow-nescrow?  We don't get called to serve on a "jury-worry" (although, semantically, that term would make some sense), and no one speaks of going off to jaily-waily (again appropriate).

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There's one last phenomenon I have to address here.  You don't hear it much anymore, but I recall a handy spontaneous reduplicative that speakers would use to dismiss something.  If someone tried to caution you about, say, a policy that you wanted to ignore, you might say, "Policy schmolicy."  You could use the same "schm" to form other rebellious reduplicatives, such as "rules-schmules" and "board-schmoard."  "Listen, Mark," someone might say to me, "you had better run that idea by the board," to which I could reply with a bit of swagger, "board-schmord"--except, as a responsible chancellor who wants to keep my job, I, for one, would not be inclined to say such a thing.

Now, go out there and soak up some reduplicatives wherever you find them--and if you ever happen to be on a beach with me and we're wearing flip-flops, let me ask an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny favor.  Please, please don't call them "sandals."  That's like bypassing the rhubarb pie on the dessert menu for the fruit cup.  Even if you are a goody-goody who tends to favor froufrou language, the kind that is always in tip-top, ship-shape condition, please don't pooh pooh reduplicatives.  Language should be relished, okey dokey?  Bring on the razzle-dazzle!