Four weeks back, I began a column on ‘double-headers’, words like knick-knack or flip-flop, whose two halves echo each other. It grew and grew. It had to become a double-header itself, and the second half followed two weeks ago. And now, lo, with some help from readers noting words I’d left out, it’s turned into a treble-header.
No more, I swear. Though in the hurly-burly (as in Shakespeare, and earlier than that) of this topsy-turvy world (earlier still), don’t be too certain. We journalists — and let’s have no argy-bargy about this (as in argument) — are notorious riff-raff (which, in the 1400s, meant “one and all”, hence today’s meaning, “rabble”), never averse to a bit of hanky-panky or to turning our promises arsy-versy (“upside-down”, and its origins I needn’t bother you with).
Many double-headers mean “confusion”: hodge-podge or hotch-potch, drawn from an old French legal term, hochepot, for gathering together the belongings of someone who died leaving no will, to get the total equitably distributed; mish-mash; higgledy-piggledy, born as higly-pigly, some say, and suggesting any herd of swine. Both pell-mell and helter-skelter can bear this sense, though both primarily convey haste, not just confusion. Bric-a-brac, the stuff you buy at a thieves’ bazaar, began as a French phrase for “at random”. Even knick-knack, before becoming some trifle you may find among the bric-a-brac, began as a “petty trick”.
Like these, many other double-headers imply disapproval or derision: riff-raff; flibberty-gibbet (“a flighty woman”); fuddy-duddy (“old-fashioned and conservative”, from fuddled); dilly-dally and shilly-shally (as I habitually do until some deadline forces me to start writing); raggle-taggle (“ill-clothed” — it began as rag-tag, or tag-rag, both words meaning torn pieces of cloth; as rag, tag and bobtail it is now plain “riff-raff”, though why bobtail, a horse with its tail cut short, is unclear). La-di-da or lardy-dardy began life as the 19th-century British riff-raff’s mockery of the way their superiors spoke. Hoity-toity is an ancient word for the stand-offish way these latter may behave; arty-farty a modern one for, as some wit put it, addicts of “Art with a capital F”.
Other such include wishy-washy and slip-slop (“careless”); claptrap (“nonsense”, though originally an actor’s device for winning applause and later a physical mechanism for imitating it) and mumbo-jumbo (“high-sounding nonsense”). For “ordinary and dull” we have humdrum. A sing-song is just an event where people sing, but a sing-song voice means monotonous speech, with little variation of stress or pitch. Goody-goody is a children’s gibe at others deemed too well-behaved; lovey-dovey an adults’ one for any over-display of affection. And the 19th-century British soldier knew his curly-haired African opponents as fuzzy-wuzzies.
There are exceptions: double-headers such as ding-dong that merely imitate sounds, or a few nouns like hubble-bubble, a hookah pipe, or, popular in Britain, the nitty-gritty, the hard core of some problem or task. Plus some mostly modern words that aren’t pure double-headers at all, since both halves of the word, as in claptrap, have real and relevant meanings: walkie-talkie, for instance; rom-com or am-dram (“romantic comedy” and “amateur dramatics”); or gang-bang, a damnable activity certainly, but that wasn’t why the word was invented.
Why is this? Why do these self-echoing words so often imply disapproval, or at least make fun of something? In my army days, a regiment stationed nearby was the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. Highly competent soldiers, I’m sure, yet we called them the Obbly-Gobblies. Why? I’ve no idea. Is the same true of other languages that use double-headers? Maybe some reader can tell me.
