Don’t dally-dilly thinking about it—you probably felt the offending phrase zag-zig through your gut with the intensity of a pong ping ball.
And for that you can thank the rule of “ablaut reduplication”—a hidden formula all English speakers know implicitly despite having never heard of it before.
Tatiana Ayazo/Rd.com. Reduplication, as you can probably guess, refers to when a word is repeated in phrases like bye-bye, choo-choo, and Nae Nae.
And while you may not consciously realize it, almost every example of ablaut reduplication in the English language follows the exact same pattern.
If there are two words then the first is I and the second is either A or O.”.
As to why this I-A-O pattern has such a firm hold in our linguistic history, nobody can say.
Whatever the case, the world’s English speakers are on-board, and you will never catch Lucy accusing Charlie Brown of being washy-wishy. »
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