Reduplication

Today, I encountered the expression “hem and haw”, which means “to hesitate” or “to speak hesitantly”. Both “to hem” and “to haw” are used independently as an expression of hesitation. Other variants include “hem and hawk”, “hem and ha”, “hum and haw”, etc.

This expression reminds me of another expression, “hanky-panky”, meaning “foolish, improper, often sexual, behavior”. In linguistics, such process of forming a new word by repeating a word or stem is called “reduplication”. It is described in detail in Wikipedia, and it is quite interesting (especially its form and function).

As for English, I didn’t find many interesting facts, but at least there are so many commonly used reduplications. I personally knew the following: “hokey-pokey”, “hocus-pocus”, “hanky-panky”, “razzle-dazzle”, “super-duper”, “easy-peasy”, “flip-flop”, “hip-hop”, “ping-pong”, “tick-tock”, and “zig-zag” (That’s it?).

Other than those in the example list, I came up with “okey-dokey” (meaning “okay”) and “potato potato” (pronounced like /pəˈteɪtəʊ pəˈtɑːtəʊ/, meaning “a negligible or unimportant difference”¹), though I’m not sure if the latter is really called reduplication.

How many reduplications do you know?