You’ll hear this often among business people (who also often eat their own dog food as it relates to the team actually using whatever solution they’re building themselves) who use it as a way to convey faithful following. Long time no see you.'” Drink the Kool-Aid Drannan’s book Thirty-one Years on Plains (1901): “When we rode up to him he said: ‘Good mornin. The current earliest citation comes from W.F. “Long time no see was originally meant as a humorous interpretation of a Native American greeting, used after a prolonged separation. Some say this when they see someone in person, but many others use a version of this in digital communications like “long time no email.” In any case, the Oxford Dictionary tells us, this too is a form of pidgin English, adapted from Native American origins. “The phrase dates from the mid-19th to early-20th centuries, an era when Western attitudes toward the Chinese were markedly racist.” However, as NPR reports, “The utterance ‘chop-chop’ would also become closely associated with class over time, and was almost always said by someone powerful to someone below.” No can doĪnd speaking of pidgin, the Oxford Dictionary says this phrase also originated there.
Chop chopĪccording to the Anglo-India dictionary Hobson-Jobson published in 1886, the phrase originates from the Cantonese word kap, which means “make haste” and converted to pidgin English that was often used on sailing ships. And most regrettably, Marie Claire used the phrase in 2014 when writing about demographic numbers at Netflix. If only it were a relic of the past–Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase used in it 2012 when he said his company was “open kimono” with regulators. Basically, a somewhat sexist synonym for ”open the books,” it means to reveal the inner workings of a project or company to a prospective new partner. Any attempt to change this order sounds BAD.Probably stemming from the rash of Japanese acquisitions of American enterprises in the ’80s, that has been adopted into the Microspeak marketing lexicon. Adjective categories always come in a particular order. It turns out that there is another unwritten rule in English grammar-one that most people have never noticed before. Second, Word People understand that language should be celebrated! It’s our heritage, and it’s fun! The Unwritten Adjective Rule If you want your pioneering ablaut reduplication to catch on fist-fast, then follow the rule. Wordplayers who want to add fresh ideas to our collective lexicon should pay attention. Are you saying that as television Tim, or TIM-tim?įirst, new words are being created all the time.Ĭontrastive focus reduplication uses stressed repetition to highlight the distinction between a noun’s essence and its literal state: It expresses indifference by pairing a word with a made-up reformation of the first word where the initial consonant is replaced by shm.Ĭomparative reduplication repeats an adjective to indicate an object’s change over time:Ĭomparative reduplication can avoid unintentional comparisons to another object, for instance: Shm- reduplication is a feature of American English with Yiddish roots. Rhyming reduplication refers to simple word pairs that rhyme:Įxact reduplication employs repeated words evocative of baby talk, which soften the tone of the subject: See-saw doesn’t use the letter i, but the high-vowel-before-low-vowel pattern still applies.Ĭool, right? If you think of any counter examples, let us know! Five Other Types of Reduplication 1. The i sound is considered a high vowel because of the location of the tongue relative to the mouth in American speech. In linguistic terms, you could say that a high vowel comes before a low vowel. In all these ablaut reduplication word pairs, the key vowels appear in a specific order: either i before a, or i before o. See if you can spot the unwritten rule in the following list of ablaut reduplication examples:
Ablaut reduplication pairs words with internal vowel alternations. English has at least six types of reduplication.
In linguistics, reduplication is the expressive repetition of a single word, or the pairing of a word with another of similar sound or spelling. You’ve definitely used it, but you’ve almost certainly never noticed. Like The Unwritten Adjective Rule, The Unwritten Ablaut Reduplication Rule is a maxim that we all seem to follow instinctively. English is rich with fun, eccentric conventions that go unnoticed.
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