August 11, 2024

AUG 11, duplication: claptrap

  a) Reprise of material posted on August 11 in previous years ...


2020: Palindrome Valley, bidirectional pen (illustrated poem)
2021: political palindromes, MMM (wordplay) 
2022: defining opinion, holdout (poem)
2023: exotic destination, air travel (poem)

To access the details of any item in slide format, type its title, as displayed above in red font (e.g. ... holdout), into one of the two search bars at the the top of your blog-page. Underneath the slide(s) for each entertaining delight that you discover, you will find a clickable link that lets you easily explore a more widespread collection of wonderments (verse, photos, wordplay, song-lyrics etc.) on the topic of your choice. 

b) Today's Offering (Aug 11, 2024): 

Authors' Note: The disparaging term gobbledegook was first used in 1944 by a Texas politician named Maverick (scion of the original staunchly independent thinker). Its meaning — pompous, overinflated language — gave rise a few year later to the equivalent bafflegab. These expressions, employing repetition of sounds, have a musical and amusing quality, as do their venerable synonyms --hogwashpoppycockbalderdashbunkum and tommyrot, but only their close cousin claptrap (alternately clap-trap) -- would qualify as a reduplication.


Readers willing to go down an internet rabbit-hole can easily get to a collection of more than a dozen other short verses SHORT VERSES  in which we have dealt with specific reduplications. 

If interested, you could also discover three fairly lengthy PATTER-SONGS about this fascinating linguistic phenomenon. These songs form an important part of our cycle of 9 songs about "Word Pairs".

 

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