reflect a past age. A modern ear would make nothing of You are but just come out of the Cloth- Market — meaning ‘you’ve just got out of bed’. And although the gist of this extract from Swift’s Polite Conversation is clear enough, some expressions do require a gloss.
LADY SMART: Well, Ladies, now let us have a Cup of Discourse to our selves. [a cup of tea and talk]
LADY ANSWERALL: What do you think of your Friend, Sir John Spendall?
LADY SMART: Why, Madam, ’tis happy for him that his Father was born before him. [in other words, he isn’t thrifty]
MISS NOTABLE: They say, he makes a very ill Husband to my Lady.
LADY ANSWERALL: Well, but he must be allowed to be the fondest Father in the World.
LADY SMART: Ay, Madam, that’s true; for they say, the Devil is kind to his own.
MISS NOTABLE: I am told, my Lady manages him to Admiration.
LADY SMART: That I believe, for she’s as cunning as a dead Pig; but not half so honest.
Swift points out that the reader will find these phrases extremely helpful, for the expressions can be used over and over on all occasions. He wouldn’t find much difference if he were observing polite conversation today. Some things don’t change.
56. Dilly-dally — a reduplicating word (17th century)
English has some ingenious ways of making new vocabulary, but none more so than the technique of taking a word and saying it twice in quick succession — but changing one of the vowels or consonants in the process. The phenomenon is called reduplication.
It’s something that little children do quite naturally when they’re learning to talk. Many of their early words contain a repeated syllable — mama, dada, baba, bye-bye, night-night, wee-wee — and soon the reduplication appears with a change in the vowel — mummy, daddy, baby. It’s a short step from there to doing the same thing with two words. We hear it in many nursery rhymes and fairy stories. Do you remember Chicken Licken, who was so worried that the sky was falling down that he rushed off to tell the king? On the way he met a host of reduplicating friends — Henny Penny, Goosey Loosey, Turkey Lurkey — and, eventually, Foxy Loxy. The names vary in different tellings (such as Hen Len and Goose Loose), but the reduplication is always there.
This is reduplication for fun. The repetition is there to make the names sound appealing, and it also helps children remember the story. Grown-ups reduplicate for other reasons too. Sometimes it’s simply to emphasise a meaning, often adding a note of exasperation or criticism. This is what happened to dally, which already existed in 16th-century English as a verb meaning ‘trifle’ or ‘delay’. Around the beginning of the 17th century, it was reduplicated. Stop dilly-dallying! meant ‘Make your mind up!’ The same sort of development happened with shilly-shally, also expressing the notion of being undecided. This was originally shill I, shall I, a stronger version of shall I, shall I.
11. A children’s story that relies on reduplication for its effect. Words like zig-zag are created for a different reason. Here there’s an attempt to symbolise a shape or movement in the outside world. The contrasting vowels reflect a change in direction. Zig-zag originally described a pattern of short, angled lines going in alternate directions, but it was soon used for all kinds of alternating shapes and movements — from lightning to knitting patterns. During the First World War it became a piece of military slang. If you were zig-zag, you were drunk.
Interesting things can happen to these reduplicated words. They can even be broken down into their parts, each one being used as a separate word. We can talk about people shillying and shallying. One such usage gained immortality in an old music-hall song:
My old man said ‘Follow the van, And don’t dilly dally on the way’. Off went the van wiv me ’ome packed in it, I followed on wiv me old cock linnet. But I dillied and dallied, dallied and I dillied, Lost me way and don’t know where to roam… The list of reduplicated words in English is a very long one. The usual pattern is for the first element to have a vowel high up in the front of the mouth and the second element to have one low down in the back of the mouth. The i-to-a change is very popular — pitter-patter, riff-raff, knick-knack, chit-chat… So is i-to-o: criss-cross, sing-song, ping-pong, tick-tock… Another pattern uses a change of consonant, and the two elements rhyme: helter-skelter, hanky-panky, fuddy-duddy, super- duper… Shakespeare evidently liked this kind of word creation, for several examples appear in his plays: skimble-skamble, bibble-babble, hugger-mugger, hurly-burly…
Some reduplications must be quite old. Although willy-nilly isn’t recorded until the 17th century, its forms reflect a much earlier state of the language — will I, nill I, where nill is Old English, a conflation of ne and will, meaning ‘will not’. And they evidently remain popular, as new reduplications continue to be created. Since the 1970s we’ve had hip-hop, happy- clappy and oogly-boogly. Oogly-boogly? Something scary that jumps out at you in a horror film. Remember the monster that bursts out of the chest of Kane (John Hurt) in Alien? That was an oogly-boogly.
57. Rep — a clipping (17th century)
If you’re a rep, what are you? In the 17th century, you weren’t one: you had one. Rep was short for reputation. People would say something upon rep, meaning, ‘I’ll stake my reputation on it’.
In the late 1600s it was linguistically fashionable to shorten words in this way. People didn’t say incognito in casual speech, but incog. They said That’s pos or pozz for positive — meaning ‘That’s certain’. And they talked about a crowd of people as a mob. That was a two-stage shortening. Mobile vulgus, meaning ‘fickle crowd’, had come into English at the end of the 16th century. During the next century it was first shortened to mobile, and then to mob.
Words which are reduced in size in this way are called clippings. The essayist Joseph Addison couldn’t stand them. In an issue of the Spectator in 1711 he complained about the way people have ‘miserably curtailed some of our Words’, and he cites all the above. (It didn’t stop him using pozz himself, a few years later, though.)
Clippings are very common in the history of English. The ends of words are clipped in ad, celeb, doc and prof. The beginnings go in phone and
