You've known this English rule your entire life—and never heard of it before now. Can you find the error in the following sentence? “The bells chimed dong, dang ...

In his angry dissent to the court's decision on the Defense of Marriage Act, Justice Scalia conveyed a specific kind of derision through his use of several colloquial expressions. He talked of the ...

Chances are likely you’ve never heard of the term “ablaut reduplication.” It was new to me as well when a friend emailed a hard-to-read screenshot of a brief newspaper clipping. Being a word person, ...

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. Which made-up phrase sounds better to you: “sack sick” or “sick sack”? How about “make mock” or “mock make”? If ...

Are you frustrated by mumbo jumbo? Do you hate mish-mashes? Does it stress you out when life goes higgledy-piggledy? Even if you answered yes to all of the above, it's hard to deny the charm of ...

English shmenglish. Language shmanguage. The practice of copying a word and sticking a shm- onto it came into the U.S. with Yiddish speakers in the late 19th century, and by the 1930s it had spread ...

This is a preview. Log in through your library . Abstract Bisyllabic, partially reduplicated words in classical Chinese fall under two major categories: i-words and r-words. An i-word consists of ...

This is a preview. Log in through your library . Abstract The Ancient Greek perfect tense poses an interesting empirical puzzle involving reduplication. While consonant-initial roots display a ...

A typical centrosome consists of one unduplicated or duplicated centriole 1, surrounded by pericentriolar material (PCM), which is responsible for most centrosomal functions. The number of centrosomes ...

English shmenglish. Language shmanguage. The practice of copying a word and sticking a shm- onto it came into the U.S. with Yiddish speakers in the late 19th century, and by the 1930s it had spread ...