This video was made possible by CuriosityStream.
Get the Nebula-CuriosityStream bundle for the sale price of less than $15 a year by
going to curiositystream.com/HAI.
How do you do, fellow kids?
Are you into hop-hip?
No?
What about tok-tik?
Or perhaps I could interest you in a game of pong-ping?
I’ll just need to be careful because I’m wearing flop-flips.
Why are you laughing with me?
What’s that?
Oh, you’re laughing at me.
I see.
Well, how about I prove just how cool and lit I am by spending the next five minutes
explaining the obscure grammatical phenomenon behind why everything I said before made me
sound like Joe Biden trying to get out the youth vote.
It’s called ablaut reduplication, and to understand it, we have to do like a hop-hipper
and break it down.
So, ablaut is just any pattern of vowel shifts inside of related words.
Like sing-sang-sung: the S, N, and G stay the same, but the vowel changes.
Ablaut is used for a lot of different things; sometimes, like with sing-sang-sung, it’s
to shift verb tenses: sing is present tense, sang is simple past tense, and sung is past
participle—and I know you’ve forgotten what a past participle is, but given the limited
time we’ve cut our explanation.
There are lots of English verbs that do this: give and gave, ride and rode, drink-drank-drunk,
and stink-stank-stunk.
Ablaut is also sometimes used to distinguish singular and plural nouns: that’s why, for
example, you can fight off one goose, but you’ll be beaten up by multiple geese.
You can try to kick the geese with one foot, but soon they’ll manage to tie up both your
feet.
And whether you’re a man or a woman, you’ll be most humiliated when you have to yell at
several nearby men and women to save you.
Now let’s talk about reduplication, which is country-club-elitist-vaccine-talk for when
you repeat a word, or part of it, for some effect.
Like a leprechaun’s tax filings, reduplication comes in many forms.
The simplest is exact reduplication, which is when you just repeat a word exactly.
It’s why you might tell a child it’s a no-no to cry wah-wah before night-night—or
why your drunken friend might go wee-wee on a putt-putt course, and have to say bye-bye
once he’s arrested by the po-po.
Some languages will use exact reduplication to create plurals: in Malay, rumah is a house,
and rumah-rumah is houses; it’s a convention that, like many patents, has been copied by
Chinese: for example, in Mandarin, ren is person, and renren is people.
In English, there are a number of other reduplication variants.
One is rhyming reduplication: it’s why you might use a teenie-weenie, itsy-bitsy walkie-talkie
to gather a super-duper rag-tag team, and then you could all do the hokey-pokey.
Quite possibly the most fun variation is called “shm reduplication,” which is when you
repeat a word, but replace the beginning with “shm.”
For nouns, shm reduplication makes you sound dismissive of that thing: “You’re tired?
Tired-shmired, get over it.”
“You got beaten up by a violent gang of geese?
Geese-shmeese, walk it off.”
For adjectives, though, shm doesn’t dismiss the meaning, but intensifies it; that’s
why you can go to a fancy-schmancy restaurant—or at least, you can if your attitude on public
health is “covid-shmovid.”
Shm reduplication originates from Yiddish-speaking areas of New York, and has since become widely
adopted across the country by anyone who wants to make something sound dumb, and it’s especially
interesting because it is productive, which means you can apply it to whatever word you
want.
YouTube, ShmouTube.
Wendover, Shmendover.
Smosh, Shmosh—actually that one doesn’t really work well, but you get the idea.
Another reduplication variation is contrastive focus reduplication, where you emphasize the
first repetition to imply you want the true form of something.
I don’t want oat milk, I want milk milk.
Or as many viewers are likely commenting, I don’t want grammar jokes, I want joke
jokes.
So, now you know what ablaut is, and what reduplication is, which means it’s time
for the incredible Avengers-style team-up you knew was coming all along: ablaut reduplication.
Ablaut reduplication is when you repeat a word, but with a vowel shift… and we use
it all the time.
Chit-chat, flip-flop, flim-flam, hip-hop, riff-raff, knick-knack, ticky-tacky, wishy-washy,
pish-posh, criss-cross; and there are tons more, but what’s really fascinating about
ablaut reduplication is that it’s a rule that native English speakers intuitively know,
but have probably never thought about: anytime you use ablaut reduplication, the vowel shift
must follow this precise order: I then A, then O.
Nearly every instance of ablaut reduplication starts with “i” as the first vowel, followed
by a shift to either “a” or “o”—in the case of rare three-parters, like tic-tac-toe
or splish-splash-splosh, the A always goes before the O.
This vowel shift pattern is called a front-to-back pattern, because the first vowel sound, the
sound you get from the “i” in words like flip or hip, ĭ, is formed at the front of
the mouth, and the next vowel sounds—which for “o” are either ŏ like flop or ô
like song and for “a” are either ă like flap or ä like washy—those vowel sounds
are formed at the back of your mouth.
Say “pish-posh” out loud right now, and notice how the ĭ in pish is at the front
of your mouth, and the ŏ in posh is at the back.
Then notice how everyone in the library is staring at you.
Now, there are a few examples of ablaut reduplication that start with not with “i” but with
“e”—hee-haw, see-saw, and teeter-totter—but even then, that long “e” is a front vowel,
so the front-to back pattern is still followed.
Bottom line is, if you don’t follow a precise front-to-back vowel pattern—you try to say
hop-hip or cross-criss or tac-toe-tic—you’ll sound like your brain is a bit wibbly-wobbly.
And I know that you’re wondering: why?
Why do we do this extremely specific, weirdly technical vowel shift to describe everything
from dumb shoes to dumb games to dumb racist allegories?
Well, we genuinely have no idea.
Seriously.
Not a clue.
All the theories are about as useful as everyone’s guesses about what Evan Peters was doing on
Wandavision, which means that in the end, ablaut reduplication’s origins will always
remain wishy-washy and topsy-turvy.
You may think ablaut reduplication is a bunch of pish-posh, but you know what’s tip top?
The Nebula-CuriosityStream bundle.
If you like HAI or Wendover, you’ll definitely want to check out my three-part trivia show,
40-minute HAI bricks special, podcast, and a new Wendover Original coming out April 6th:
all of which are exclusively available only on Nebula.
Plus, with the bundle, you’ll also get access to CuriosityStream, the incredible streaming
site with thousands of top-quality documentaries, including The History of English, a great
short documentary that’s about… well, the history of English.
Right now, the Nebula-CuriosityStream bundle is on sale for less than $15 for the entire
year—so head over to CuriosityStream.com/HAI, and help support independent creators like
me.