Two weeks ago, I wrote on “double-header” words such as zigzag or shilly-shally. Appropriately, I promised a second instalment. So I must provide one, willy-nilly.

A neat word to start with. Willy-nilly is one of not many double-headers whose two halves don’t just echo each other. Its basic sense is “willingly or unwillingly”, and both parts contribute. By origin —1,000 years ago or so — it was will he, ne will he (or I or we or you), “does he want to or doesn’t he”, ne being an old word for not. Latin has an equivalent, nolens volens, “unwilling or willing”, close in sound as in sense: Latin’s v was spoken (as often in Indian English) much like a w — hence its vespa, our wasp. But whether it gave us willy-nilly is unclear.

Willy-nilly can also mean “haphazardly”, which one authority calls its primary sense today. Really? I’ve never once met it so used. Oddly, two other double-headers can, dubiously, have that sense. Pell-mell to me means “in hasty confusion”, with as much emphasis on haste as on confusion. So does helter-skelter, with little idea of confusion at all. Yet both, say my dictionaries, can mean simply “in confusion”, as in the books were heaped pell-mell (or helter-skelter) around her. I’d never use either word that way; and the only origin cited for helter-skelter is Middle English skelte, “hasten”.

Verbal ancestry

Pell-mell, oddly, is the correct, though dying, pronunciation of Pall Mall, a grand London street of gentlemen’s clubs (that is, for gentlemen, not lecherous males eager for some lap-dancing. But I doubt there was much distinction when these now solemn clubs were first set up: a woman colleague, reporting on such clubs in Spain, was told the only way one would let her inside was — yes, in the 1970s! — by the back-door for prostitutes. To which, being a true reporter, she agreed). In virtuous contrast, The Mall, a leafy avenue nearby leading up to Buckingham Palace, rhymes with pal.

Curiously, many of these words begin with an h. Hugger-mugger, born in the 1600s, maybe from an old word meaning “wrap up”, is a cousin of helter-skelter, with two meanings, “in confusion” or — now rarely — “in secret”. So too, on the other side, is harum-scarum — “reckless”, maybe from hare (“to run”) and scare. I’ve always thought hoity-toity — “stand-offish” or “conceited” — a distortion of haughty. Not so: it began with hoit, a long-dead verb meaning “to behave with noisy mirth”, and once meant something like that. The heeby-jeebies, a feeling of alarm or depression, is a 1920s’ American invention, of no known verbal ancestry. But the origins and sense of happy-clappy, used by solemn Christians since the 1990s to mock less restrained ones, are self-evident.

Says the book

Hocus-pocus too, now “nonsense” but once used by conjurors, like today’s hey presto, at the culmination of some trick, also may have a sectarian origin. A 17th-century Anglican archbishop said it sprang from the Latin hoc est corpus, “this is (my) body” used by Catholics to express their belief that the bread and wine of the church’s Communion service is somehow the actual body and blood of Christ. But that Anglican sneer is probably hocus-pocus itself. Dictionaries offer other mock-Latin origins.

Jeepers creepers is strictly Christian: a way to exclaim Jesus Christ! without actually saying it. The double-header with the oddest derivation I know, namby-pamby, also began as a name: that of Ambrose Phillips, a sentimental 1720s’ poet. Well, so say my books, and certainly other poets used the word to deride him. But did they invent it, or just adopt/adapt a word already in use? I wonder, and I’ve no easy-peasy answer.