The Charms of Onomatopoeia and Frivolity in English

More on ablaut reduplication.

Knick-knack paddywhack give a dog a bone, this old man…

Previously on this topic I mentioned how onomatopoeia can play a key role, as does the idea of movement: splish-splash-splosh for the first and flip-flop for the second, which also is originally onomatopoeic. But there are other ‘commonalities’ as HR departments would say, or, what we humans tend to say, ‘common threads’, ‘common features’, ‘common denominators’ even, but never the dreaded ‘commonalities’. I’d like to look at two of them today.

First, the idea of frivolity, of something – or even someone –  not being entirely serious, of being a trifle or a trifler. That notion clearly links knick-knacks and bric-a-brac. The second the OED defines as ‘small objects and ornaments…regarded as having little value’, while knick-knacks are ‘any curious or pleasing trifle more for ornament than use; a trinket’.*

Trim-trams and flimflam

In fact, the /i-a/ rhyming sequence seems almost specifically designed to facilitate the coining of terms suggesting triviality, even if some don’t last the course. In chronological order, may I introduce you to these words, which are so very satisfying to say:

• trim-tram n. (1523; obsolete) ‘Apparently A personal ornament of little value; a pretty toy or trifle’.

The OED editors hedge their bets with that ‘Apparently’. The citation below which they provide might cast doubt on the caveat ‘of little personal value’:

A frenche hode wyth an edge of golde, besydes pearles and precious stons and suche other trime trames.

Thomas Becon, Jewel of Joy in Worckes vol. II. 19 b. (1560).

• whim-wham n. (before 1529) ‘in early use chiefly, a trifling ornament of dress’. It also seems to be a variety of trifle, made with a base of sponge (fingers), oranges, booze of your choice, raspberries and cream. There’s a recipe, or perhaps I should say receipt, as we’re talking 18C, here. Various modern businesses have taken advantage of its euphony, it seems, to sell bone-china buttons, or, dare I say it, knick-knacks and bric-a-brac. Collins and M-W both list it.
• fiddle-faddle, my personal favourite in this group, as a noun, 1577, as a verb 1633:

The fiddle-faddle of arranging all the things was troublesome.

W. Scott, Journal (8 Jul. 1827).

She has…fiddle-faddled about the garden, picking off half-a-dozen dead roses.

R. Broughton, Red as Rose, vol. I. 226 (1870).

I have to confess, if I’m feeling cynical and jaded, certain aspects of lexicography tend to strike me as truly fiddle-faddle.

In any case, this one seems to be flourishing and is recorded as noun and verb in Collins and the Oxford Dictionary of English (ODE; which is not the same as the OED) and as a noun alone in Merriam-Webster, which notes that it’s often an interjection.

• whinny-whanny n. (1673; obsolete and only one OED citation) ‘? A trivial thing, trifle’ – that OED question mark is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I wonder if this is a hapax legomenon.
• niff-naff (1728) The verb,  ‘To trifle, mess around; to act aimlessly or foolishly’, predates the noun by several decades, is cited twice from eighteenth-century Scottish sources in the OED, and then in dialect or slang dictionaries. It was RAF slang during the war:* How far the italics below extend is important:

Niff-naff, don’t, stop fussing and get cracking.

C.H. Ward-Jackson, R.A.F. Slang made Easy 45 (1945).

Collins and Merriam-Webster cover the verb and noun meanings, whereas the ODE covers only the noun, but with several examples, which must be taken from Oxford University Press’s corpora:

The rest is irrelevant niff naff you’d only doze through anyway.

He was disappointed at the “niff naff and trivia” being raised at the meeting.

The first OED citation, of 1808, for the noun is from An Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, while the most recent shows the word alive and kicking outside its Scottish, Northern English and Northern Irish homelands – though it’s entirely possible, of course, the writer was from one of those areas:

If you can bear to chuck out—or store if you must—the niff-naff of your previous lifestyle, you can indulge in the current passion for the pared-down look.

Western Daily Press (Bristol) (Electronic edition; 30 Dec. 2000).

Elegant synonyms for ‘nonsense, rubbish’

The second common thread from which some of these reduplicated words hang is the notion of verbal activity, often of an unappreciated kind. Six of the most delectable date to the sixteenth century, that period of unbridled logorrhoeic inventiveness:

Tilly-vally, interjection and n. (before 1529) meaning ‘Fiddlesticks!’; first in Skelton and then Shakespeareanly in:

Tilly fally, sir Iohn, nere tel me: & your ancient swaggrer comes not in my doores.

Henry IV, Part 2 ii. iv. 81 (1600).

Flimflam n. (c.1538 in the meaning ‘deception’) is first recorded meaning ‘ a piece of nonsense’ in the earliest collection of everyday English proverbs, John Heywood’s 1546 A Dialogue Conteinyng the Nomber in Effect of All the Prouerbes in the Englishe Tongue:

She maketh ernest matters of euery flymflam.

The ODE gives ‘symbolic reduplication’ as the etymology, which describes it aptly. The word’s still going strong in that sense, so much so that I managed to slip it into the Preface of my forthcoming The Metaphor Zoo: Why the English language loves animals, publishing UK 5 November 2026, US January 2027.

Trish-trash seems to have had a long run on the stage of the Tudor word theatre, opening in 1542 and closing in 1602. Tit for tat, which I’m including as a phrase illustrating the i-a progression, dates to 1546, again in Heywood, and in later use is, the OED notes, ‘a parenthetic or interjectional phrase’, as in this bawdy proverb:

Titt for tatt, quoth the Wife when she farted at the Thunder.

J. Kelly, Complete Collection of Scotish Proverbs 310 (1721).

The remaining three from the Tudor century are triff-traff (1547), fible-fable (1581), which I’ve sneaked in despite its contravening the /i-a/ rule, and snip-snap, coined in 1597 for the clacking of scissors but first used in the sense of witty repartee in 1727.

I won’t try your readerly patience too much further by individually listing the remaining nine. I’ll just note that chit-chat, which sounds to me totally current and contemporary, dates in fact to the early eighteenth century in this moralising citation:

‘Tis the custom of foolish people…in their chit chat to be always biting people’s reputation behind their back.

S. Palmer, Moral essays on some of the most curious and significant English, Scotch and foreign proverbs (1710);

and chit-chat reminds me of Ogden Nash’s sublime spoof of Yeats’ ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, with its glorious closing pun;

that the 1677 twit-twat, ‘idle chat’ contains the taboo second element that Robert Browning famously misunderstood, believing it, from a quotation he’d read, to refer to a nun’s headgear, matching a monk’s cowl:

Then, owls and bats, cowls and twats, Monks and nuns..Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!;

and that the nineteenth century produced crink-crank, for sesquipedalian words, as in this 1865 quotation mimicking dialect speech from the author of Lorna Doone:

Them crink-crank words is beyond me. Moy head be awl wivvery wi’ ’em.

R. D. Blackmore, Cradock Nowell xxiii, in Macmillan’s Magazine (Sept. 1865).

Don’t you love ‘wivvery’? It means ‘giddy’ and, thanks to Google, I now know is recorded in an appendix to an 1867 book, The New Forest: its history and its scenery, by John Richard de Capel Wise (some moniker, egh?), illustrated by none other than Walter Crane. Crink-crank is possibly related to crinkum-crankum, ‘something intricately or fancifully elaborated’ as applied to language.

‘ “My head is wivvery,” is no uncommon expression. To wivver, given by Wright and Halliwell as used in Kent, is more especially employed here of the quivering flight of hawks, particularly of the kestrel and hen-harrier’;

and jiggery-pokery (1893), a word of the kind particularly relished by Antonin Scalia, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, who was renowned for his scathing way with words:

‘If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,” I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.’

What about the a-i-o vowel progression in other languages?

Thanks to the BBC’s hilarious and wonderfully informative ‘The Unbelievable Truth’ – it truly ‘informs, educates and entertains’ all in one go – I was alerted to how ‘snap, crackle and pop’, the jingle and the characters for Kellogg’s Rice Crispies, are translated.

Well, Flemish and Dutch follow the pattern with their  Pif! Paf! Pof!, as does French with its Cric! Crac! Croc!, Italy with its Pif! Paf! Pof! and Switzerland with Piff! Paff! Poff! Italy also makes me think of the three characters at the court in Puccini’s Turandot, Ping, Pang and Pong.

Finnish keeps the vowels, but, unlike those just mentioned, doesn’t triplicate and doesn’t follow the canonical ablaut order: Poks! Riks! Raks!

Danish Pif! Paf! Puf! looks at first blush like an exception, but that u of Puf is often pronounced /ɒ/ in a phrase which, so the Danish dictionary – Den Danske Ordbog – tells me ‘is used to convey (the sound of) something happening quickly or suddenly (bruges for at gengive (lyden af) at noget foregår hurtigt eller pludseligt). In other words, it’s the Danish equivalent of Bish! Bash! Bosh! And Danish svip, svap, svup also follows the rule.

Finally, so I read anecdotally on Reddit, a German speaker maintains that German too follows the ablaut reduplication rule.

Do you know another language that follows – or doesn’t – the rule? If so, I’d love to hear from you.

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* Which reminds me of the phrase ‘Neither use nor ornament’, of uknown origin, but at least as old as R.L. Stevenson’s use of it in an 1892 story. It means something or someone that is of no practical use and devoid of any aesthetic charm.

** My referring to ‘the war’, taking it as understood it’s the Second World War, does date me a bit, doesn’t it, but there you have it: I can’t do anything about my age.