September 18, 2017--Rhyming Reduplication CONTEST WINNERS

Before announcing the Rhyming Reduplication contest winners, a brief review--

The most classic Reduplication is a rhyming two-phrased compound where each of the two parts are not actual words. For example, there is no meaning associated with either heebie or jeebies. Only when they are joined as heebie-jeebies is there a meaning.

And if they are disaggregated, divided, neither part has anything to do with the meaning of the expression. There is only meaning when they are paired. Thus, heebie-jeebies together means a state of nervous fear or anxiety.

Then there is the semi-classic version where just one of the components has no separate meaning--dilly-dally is an example, were dally is an actual word. And finally there is the open definition type, where both parts can be stand-alone words but when fused together sound as if they should be a Rhyming Reduplication.

From the winners listed below we have newly made-up examples, neologisms of the three types. All wonderfully silly-nilly--extra silly.

Got it?

The contest was to create entirely new ones.

I received a number of clever submissions and a neat note from a 20-something very literate niece. She wrote--

I loved today's posting! It's so funny because just last night I was talking with friends about where the phrase "bee's-knees" comes from. We found a few varying answers on line. 

It's either an abridged version of "be all/end all" or a fun way of saying "the business." We did find a few more amusing ones that no one uses anymore, or ever--"the flea's eyebrows" or "the canaries tusks." 

OH, the English language. How lucky we are to have it as our native tongue.

These are not strictly speaking Rhyming Reduplications since bees and knees have meanings of their own. But close enough via the open-definition exception.

Bee's knees appears to have first appeared in the 1920s along with other nonsense phrases that include incongruous parings of animal names with words that pertain to humans. One of my favorites of this kind is cat's pajamas. Nothing elicits the Jazz Age better than this!

I received so many fun Rhyming Reduplications that I could not limit myself to just one winner. So . . .

Honorable Mention

These two submitted by Guest-Blogger Sharon are quite clever and deserve honorable mention--

Pinky-Winky

Sharon says it means "to lie--to wink while you do a pinky-swear."

She notes there is a type of Hydrangea called Pinky-Winky. I think Rona may have at least one in her garden. I also love pinky-swear. We used to lock pinkies all the time to designate that a promise had been made in my old Brooklyn neighborhood.

Asking if one in Spanish is acceptable, I eagerly said yes and so Sharon submitted--

Cerrado-Cortado

She says it means "Spanish coffee with a lid." 

Honorable mention also goes to Kathy Donovan who submitted Nutsy-Wutzy and the Gala Girl, Hedy Roma who wrote--

Frumpy-Lumpy: state of unfashionableness characterized by ill fitting, stretched-out "so what not to wear" clothes, as in, "As soon as Lucinda left the house she felt so frumpy-dumpy in that mauve t-shirt dress with rhinestones that accentuate her body in all the wrong places."

Late Night Submission

Past the deadline, Rona got into the game, writing--

I awoke at midnight with the pair of Rhyming Reduplications swirling in my head:

Comment to a nicely tanned person--Wowie Maui.

Comment to a badly sunburned person--Owie Maui.

I especially like Owie, but a deadline is a deadline.

And So the Winner Is . . .

John Allan from Bristol Maine!

His submission, though not a classic version because the two phrases are both actual words, is--

Queue-zoo. The meaning he assigned to it is Incomprehensible checkout lines at busy supermarkets. And to show its use in a sentence wrote--"Took me an hour to get out of Publix. It was a real queue-zoo."

John said that since "word games imply books" he asked me to donate $100 in his name to the Bristol Area Library. Which I will do.

January 14, 2106--Pithy

I don't know what compelled me to stay up late enough to watch all of the Golden Globes. Probably masochism.

With the exception of a few smartalecy barbs from the host, Ricky Gervais, I found it to be excruciatingly boring. And, of course, in my snarkiness, having seen only one or two of the movies and TV shows nominated, I disagreed with most of the awards.

Hung over the next morning, doing our own postmortem, ahead of the E channel's acidic Fashion Police, Rona and I, since we agreed, wondered out loud about why it was such a snore.

"I think mainly because the winners--and they have an endless series of categories including one for actors who were in a single episode of a TV series or movie made for television--in their acceptance speeches were so bland and unclever."

"Good point," Rona said, "It's almost as if their PR people told them to be intentionally bland so as to avoid controversy and not offend anyone or any 'demographic' that might then boycott their films. Like they did to Marlon Brando when he refused his Oscar to protest our treatment of Native Americans."

"For me, in the past, where I do a lot of my living, one of the things I used to look forward to were the pithy remarks of the winners. Some were even memorable like in 1974, when David Niven was presenting an Oscar, a naked man streaked across the stage. Nonplussed, Niven quipped, 'Isn't it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings.'"

"It's true, presenters and winners were often witty and pithy."

"To change the subject," I said, "Pithy is such an interesting word. It has a sound close to the way I understand its meaning. Not onomatopoetic exactly, but something close to that."

"I agree. I wonder about its etymology. For example, does it share a common root with pith helmet or a pit?"

"Google's the way to find out," I said. And sure enough it does have an ancient and interesting history. It goes back to at least the year 900 and the modern English version derives from a number of ancient languages including Proto-German and Old English. The common roots all originally meant the soft, spongy center or core of plant stems."

I rattled out, taxing Rona's patience, "And, further, Google says, as you suspected, that too explains pith helmet. It was originally made from the dried center of an Indian swamp plant, the Aeschyonomene aspera. Not to be found in your Maine garden. And pit indeed shares a similar history, as the hard core or stone found in the center of many fruits."

"So a pithy remark," Rona said with caffeine surging in her system, "pierces to the core of something."

"One more meaning of pith, which would reenforce what you said, is when it is used to describe piercing the spinal cord in order to kill."

"Ugh. I think it's time to change the subject again. It's bad enough I'm still recovering from the Golden Globes."

"Where this all began."

"On the other hand," Rona said, "Isn't the history of language and the creation of words about as interesting as it gets?"

"What did you say?" I was still fanatically googling.

"How interesting language is. Perhaps the most remarkable of human creations."

"Do you know what the 23 oldest English words are?"

"They probably include mother."

"It says right here that they may be as much as 15,000 years old. From the time of the last Ice Age."

"Is mother on the list?"

"No surprise, with a prescient nod to Martin Buber, I and thou are. And also there's we, hand, hear, bark, fire, and ashes."

"And mother?"

"Of course. Then there's spit as in to spit."

"What a life they must have had back then."

"Pretty basic. Fire and ashes."

"I wonder what Ricky Gervais would have to say about that."

"Spare me."

October 21, 2015--Teakettle Game

In Mrs. Peterson's 6th garde class at my elementary school, PS 244, to get us interested in vocabulary and spelling (not an easy matter), every few days she let us play the Teakettle Game. More technically, the Homonym Game.

When it was your turn you would try to challenge and frustrate your classmates (more the latter) by posing the following kind of question--

He teakettled down the canal rather than driving on the teakettle.

The other kids, from the context, were supposed to come up with the two words for which the teakettles stood. If they couldn't, you'd give them another sentence--

She parked the car on the teakettle and then teakettled in the lake.

That was usually enough for the smartest girl in the class, waving her raised hand frantically, to shout out and spell--"road" and "rowed."

It would then be her turn to come up with a stumper.

I later learned that some homonyms were of a different sort--they were pronounced the same, as road and rowed, but unlike these that are spelled differently, others are spelled the same but pronounced differently. Technically, they are homographic homonyms.

For example, lead (as in the metal) and lead (when it means being at the head of a line) are homographic homonyms.

Got it?

To see if you do, here are a couple of more Teakettle posers, homonyms of different sorts--

I will teakettle a letter with my teakettle hand.

In my hotel teakettle I bought a teakettle from the minibar and then listened to a Bach cello teakettle on the stereo.

Three or more in a sentence makes it easier to solve but is fun to construct.

There are so many of these various kinds of teakettles, sorry, homonyms, that for some time there has been a movement to simplify the spelling of some English words to limit confusion and make it easier for both native born and second-language people to learn and perfect English.

(Perfect itself, of course being a homographic homonym.)

In fact, playwright and over-all curmudgeon, George Bernard Shaw called for the development of an alternative to our 26-letter alphabet, contending that a phonetic one of at least 40 letters and orthographic symbols would make it easier to spell tens of thousands of English words. In the 1930s he sponsored a contest to attract interest in this project.

There are as a result quite a few examples of Shavian Alphabets but none caught on any more than attempts to get Britain and the United States to switch to the much more rational metric system.

Wouldn't tawt work better than taught? But then tawt would be a homonym for . . .

Here it is in one last teakettle example using tawt--

He was teakettleed to be certain the sheets were teakettle when making the bed.

June 12, 2013--Homographs and Heteronyms

Needing a break from the Patriot Act and the FISA court, I happily became obsessed with homographs--words that are spelled the same, pronounced the same, but have different meanings.

Words such as--

Bat
Bear
Change
Cool
Rock
Sign
Update

I have no idea how this popped into my head, but it did and I was grateful for it. I needed distractions.

Then, when thinking about homographs and why they even exist, I was at the same time drawn to heteronyms, hundreds of words that are spelled the same, have different meanings, but are pronounced differently.

For example--

Abuse
Address
Attribute
Bow
Can
Close
Convert
Retard
Tear
Wind

It would be easy for the English language to be "cleaned up" so there would be no more non-phonetic words such as though, trough, said, friend, guest, and again to madden poor spellers such as I. And, if we wanted, there would be no homographs or heteronyms. But our wonderful language is far from logical. Thus, no wonder so many native English speakers have trouble with spelling and grammar and why so many for whom English is not their first language have such difficulty learning it.

And this complexity does not even include the trove of idioms that enrich our language. Idioms whosee literal meanings have nothing apparent to do with their connotative meanings--

To have a chip on one's shoulder.
To rub someone the wrong way.
To get down to brass tacks.
To jump the gun.

I love these! Idioms are the most creative, most vivid, most hermetic manifestations of English and virtually every other language.

Who cares that to jump the gun is derived from the gunshot that is used to signal the start of foot races and to "jump" it means to get off to too quick a start, to an illegal start? The idiomatic meaning, not its track-and-field source, enriches our language and slips a bit of poetic mystery into even the most mundane prose.

I was an awful speller, always among the first to be publicly humiliated in elementary school spelling bees where I was unable to spell separate (I could never get all the e's and a's where they belonged) or cemetery (I always inserted an a somewhere) or surgeon (where I never got the sur quite right).

I still can't spell but thanks to SpellCheck I can get by and do not need the help of the Simplified Spelling Society's efforts.

The playwright George Bernard Shaw was devoted to this movement--he too was a notoriously poor speller. In fact, after he died, he bequeathed the bulk of his estate to it. The society's idea, and that of any number of other similar efforts, was to simplify written English using various phonetic alphabets, including some that add a dozen or so new letters to our existing 26 letter alphabet; or, to use the same kinds of symbols used in pronunciation dictionaries: for example, substitute kf for cough.

More radically, there is a Shavian phonetic alphabet that looks like this--



Perhaps these approaches would have served me well in 5th grade (though do not ask me to translate this illustration of how Shaw would have had us represent the English language); but looking back, leaning as early as the 5th grade to take a licking (idiom) in public was good training for adult work situations and now with SpellCheck . . .