Talking About Words

With Prof. Richard W. Bailey

Yada, Yada, Yada

"Avoid repetition." On my spell-checker, if you use the same word twice, you get a little wavy line under the second one. It's a warning. "Avoid repetition" is one of those "rules" about English that only a fool would obey.

Some things we like to hear over and over and over. "I love you," for instance. That's a repetition that can go on and on and on.

The last line in the Mock Turtle's song in Alice in Wonderland praises "Beautiful, beautiful soup." One beautiful might have been enough. On his ever-popular musical variety show, Lawrence Welk used to calm down the applause after some wholesome ditty by saying, "Uh-wonnerful, uh-wonnerful."

Lewis Carroll and Lawrence Welk gave us two adjectives instead of just one because they thought the first one intensified the second.

An almost-4-year-old of my acquaintance has figured out the power of repetition. "I'm very, very, very…," she says, taking a pause for breath after every seven or eight verys until she gets up to somewhere in the mid-20s. Then she says, "mad." Which is of course no longer nearly as true as when she commenced, what with the calming effects of syntactic memory and regular deep breathing.

Fortunately—and unlike the Sorcerer's Apprentice—she's figured out a way to turn off the spigot of verys.

Grown-ups like these things too. Sometimes the repetition involves semantic nuance. For instance, chocolate chocolate might be used to distinguish the stuff from milk chocolate or white chocolate. "Is it casual casual?" a recent cartoon caption asks of a garment. "Or expensive casual?"

Then there's funny funny, which occurs in the contrast between funny funny and funny strange.

A:"He's a funny guy."

B."Funny funny or funny weird?"

We can make these up on the spot. "Is he just rich? Or rich rich ?"

Sometimes the repeated adjectives occur deeper in the sentence.

"The sound grew fainter and fainter."

"The sound grew more and more faint."

Of course it is perfectly possible to say something like: "The sound grew steadily fainter." But somehow the drama of the diminishing noise seems more vivid when the faint is repeated. It could even get "fainter and fainter and fainter. "

Exuberant English puts the repetitious adjectives ahead of the noun. In 1963, Stanley Kramer directed a film with cameo appearances by nearly every comic of the day: It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World." It's not clear just why four of these mads were chosen rather than three or five. Perhaps four sounded just right.

Iterations like these sometimes occur in literature, for instance W. S. Gilbert's 19th-century lyric in The Mikado with the refrain: "On many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, a jar." Twice the number in Kramer's title.

A Google search for big big big produced more than 58,000 hits last summer, a great many of them porn porn sites.

We have a rule in our heads that regulates which adjectives can repeat. Bad, cold, soft and tiny can; alphabetical, chief, left and tenth can't (easily).

In 1835, an enterprising Chinese teacher produced an instructional list of expressions in Pidgin English that might prove useful for Chinese people who needed to converse with the "foreign devils" who had lately intruded themselves into their empire. The book reveals much about the ways in which the cultural divide was traversed, and many of the expressions involve repetitions: chin chin ‘please', chop chop ‘food', chow chow ‘edible dog', so so ‘extremely'.

So you can't really avoid repetition. The "rule" is just one of those things in school that merits (and gets) little attention from students beyond "yada, yada, yada."

Richard W. Bailey is the Fred Newton Scott Collegiate Professor of English. His most recent book is Rogue Scholar: The Sinister Life and Celebrated Death of Edward H. Rulloff, University of Michigan Press, 2003—a biography of an American thief, impostor, murderer and would-be philologist who lived from 1821 to 1871. It was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2003 .

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