codahale.com٭blog

Coda Hale lives in Berkeley, CA, where he writes about Ruby on Rails, usability, web design and development, and the occasional bit about bicycles.

This is what I think about sometimes

  • hanky-panky
  • herky-jerky
  • heebie-jeebies
  • hotsy-totsy
  • hocus-pocus
  • hurly-burly
  • higglety-pigglety
  • hobson-jobson
  • holus-bolus
  • hubble-bubble
  • hugger-mugger
  • hurry-scurry
  • helter-skelter
  • harum-scarum
  • hurdy-gurdy
  • hamper-scamper
  • handy-dandy
  • helter-skelter
  • hodge-podge
  • hokey-pokey
  • holy-moley
  • hoochie-cootchie

Thank you, The English Language, for occasionally weirding me out. Linguists, chip in: what the hell?

(On a totally unrelated note, I’ve fixed everyone’s problems with fixtures in Rails tests. Once I’m sure I’ve got it down, you’ll see it here.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 20th, 2006 at 5:46pm and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

20th Dec 2006 5:46pm Miscellany
 

5 Responses to “This is what I think about sometimes”

  1. Marc Hedlund Says:
    December 20th, 2006 at 6:58pm

    hoity-toity

  2. Jerome Says:
    December 28th, 2006 at 1:08pm

    These are examples of words formed by reduplication. Some are imitations of Latin (hocus-pocus). All just sound cool.

    Keep saving for the Rivendell!

  3. Mister Schafer Says:
    January 3rd, 2007 at 9:35am

    hummina-hummina

    -ralph kramden

  4. Pat Hall Says:
    February 9th, 2007 at 10:53am

    Okay, I admit, I actually am a linguist. :P

    My official I’m-a-linguist response is “What Jerome said.”

    And here’s a link:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication

    Note that they call the sort of thing you have in your examples “rhyming reduplication,” where as “exact reduplication” would be something like “bye-bye.”

    But that’s just terminology; what’s really interesting is that in some languages this sort of thing is not just a fun sort of thing, it’s actually a part of the grammar of the language. (There are some examples at the link above.)

    In Tagalog, the details of reduplication quicky aspire to dizzying complexities:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagalog_grammar#Verbs

    Okay I’ll shut up now :P

  5. Strass Says:
    March 2nd, 2007 at 6:05am

    Is it a contest for the name of the next Ubuntu release ? ;-)