One of the clues you might find in our crossword puzzles is ‘Aimlessly (5-5)’ – answer WILLY-NILLY. It comes from will I, nill I – ‘I am willing, I am unwilling’. It is an example of a rhyming jingle.

Rhyming jingles are fun to use, even though they have the rather serious name of reduplicatives. Technically, a reduplicative is a word or phrase formed when a term is either repeated exactly (as in chop chop), or with a different start (willy-nilly) or thirdly, with a change of consonant (riffraff).

They are also known as echo words and there are hundreds of them, frequently used in conversation. I love using these sing-song (there’s another one!) words, they’re like the playthings of the language field.

Namby-pamby, similar in meaning to wishy-washy, came from the name of the poet Ambrose Philips. Other poets of the time, who were his rivals, made fun of him and called him Namby (Ambrose) Pamby (Philips), saying his pastoral verses were insipid.

Hocus-pocus was a common name for a magician or juggler in the 1600s and may have come from the Latin ‘Hoc est corpus meum’ which was said during Mass. Now hocus-pocus means trickery or gobbledegook, and is the source of the word hoax, meaning ‘deception’.

English is not the only language to have these rhyming phrases. Japanese has many reduplicatives, which they call kasane-kotoba or ‘stacked-up-words.’ Moshi moshi is ‘hello’ when answering the phone. Doki-doki is the sound of a racing heartbeat and pika-pika is sparkling. Nyoro-nyoro is the back-and-forth sliding movement of a slithering snake and peko peko means ‘I’m hungry’ or literally ‘my stomach’s curving in’. There’s even a Japanese restaurant in Melbourne called Peko Peko.

Some are onomatopoeic such as splish splash, hush-hush or ping-pong, which is imitative of the sound of the ball hitting a hard surface.

Many reduplicatives have a sense of boisterous commotion or confusion: hubbub, to-do, hurly-burly, helter-skelter, pell-mell, harum-scarum, or untidiness: higgledy-piggledy, mishmash. Some modern additions include super-duper, okey dokey, easy-peasy and chick flick.

Happy Puzzling!