Rhyme

Question

Do we have words that have no meaning and just used to rhyme with the previous word?

Ex.

Give me sth to read book mook ,

mook here does not have any meaning and it is just used to rhyme with the book and is used as a fillar.

I made this example from myself I don't know if we even have such a thing in English.

I would be grateful if you would tell me any Example we have for this case.

Mister Micawber · Accepted Answer

Not that I know of, if you mean for poetical purposes. We have plenty of REDUPLICATION:

The coinage of new words and phrases into English has been greatly enhanced by the pleasure we get from playing with words. There are numerous alliterative and rhyming idioms, which are a significant feature of the language. These aren't restricted to poets and Cockneys; everyone uses them. We start in the nursery with choo-choos, move on in adult life to hanky-panky and end up in the nursing home having a sing-song.

The repeating of parts of words to make new forms is called reduplication. There are various categories of this: rhyming, exact and ablaut (vowel substitution). Examples, are respectively, okey-dokey, wee-wee and zig-zag. The impetus for the coining of these seems to be nothing more than the enjoyment of wordplay. The words that make up these reduplicated idioms often have little meaning in themselves and only appear as part of a pair. In other cases, one word will allude to some existing meaning and the other half of the pair is added for effect or emphasis.

New coinages have often appeared at times of national confidence, when an outgoing and playful nature is expressed in language. For example, during the 1920s, following the First World War, when many nonsense word pairs were coined - the bee's knees, heebie-jeebies etc. That said, the introduction of such terms begin with Old English and continues today. *****-nilly is over a thousand years old. Riff-raff dates from the 1400s and helter-skelter, arsy-versy ( a form of vice-versa), and hocus-pocus all date from the 16th century. Coming up to date we have bling-bling, ****-tube and hip-hop. I've not yet recorded a 21st century reduplication. Bling-bling comes very close - one can't be far away.

Here are a few examples, but there are many more:

Rhyming: - These are reminiscent of Cockney rhyming slang, although in that the rhyme is usually with some other unspoken word, which doesn't form part of the phrase. For example, trouble and strife - wife. There are a few exceptions to this guideline, for example, chevy chase - face.

Arty-farty, Boogie-woogie, Chick-flick, Chock-a-block, Gang-bang, Eency-weency, Fuddy-duddy, Fuzzy-wuzzy, Hanky-panky, Happy-clappy Harum-scarum, Heebie-jeebies, Helter-skelter, Higgledy-piggledy, Hob-***, Hobson-jobson, Hocus-pocus, Hodge-podge, Hoity-toity, Hokey-pokey, Hubble-bubble, Hugger-mugger, Hurly-burly, Itsy-bitsy/itty-bitty, Jeepers-creepers, Lardy-dardy, Lovey-dovey, Mumbo-jumbo, Namby-pamby, Nitty-gritty, Okey-dokey, Pell-mell, Raggle-taggle, Razzle-dazzle, Rumpy-pumpy, Shilly-shally, Teenie-weenie, Topsy-turvy, Walkie-talkie, *****-nilly

Exact: Several of these are baby-talk, showing how they are used to help youngsters learn the language.

Blah-blah, Bling-bling, Bye-bye, Chi-chi, Choo-choo, Chop-chop, Goody-goody, Knock-knock, No-no, Rah-rah, So-so, Wee-wee, Yada-yada

Ablaut: - This appears to be suggestive of a toing and froing motion, i.e. indicating a thing that is this and then that. For example, ding-dong, see-saw, tick-tock, zig-zag. Almost all of these use the vowel 'i' in the first part of the reduplication and either 'a' or 'o' in the second part. Why? I don't know.

Bric-a-brac, Chit-chat, Dilly-dally, Ding-dong, Fiddle-faddle, Flim-flam, Knick-knack, Mish-mash, Ping-pong, Pitter-patter, Riff-raff, See-saw, Shilly-shally, Sing-song, Tick-tock, Tip-top, Tittle-tattle,Wishy-washy, Zig-zag

(Contrastive reduplication: a phenomenon of colloquial English that we call Contrastive Reduplication (CR), involving the copying of words and sometimes phrases as in It's tuna salad, not SALAD-salad, or Do you LIKE-HIM-like him? Drawing on a corpus of examples gathered from natural speech, written texts, and television scripts, we show that CR restricts the interpretation of the copied element to a 'real' or prototypical reading. Turning to the structural properties of the construction, we show that CR is unusual among reduplication phenomena in that whole idioms can be copied, object pronouns are often copied (as in the second example above), and inflectional morphology need not be copied. Thus the 'scope' of CR cannot be defined in purely phonological terms; rather, a combination of phonological, morphosyntactic, syntactic, and lexical factors is involved. We develop an analysis within the parallel architecture framework of Jackendoff (1997, 2002), whereby CR is treated as a lexical item with syntactic and semantic content and reduplicative phonology. We then sketch an alternative analysis, based on current assumptions within the Minimalist Program, which involves movement into a focus-like position with both the head and the tail of the resulting chain spelled out.)

Hrsanei · Answer

Thanks Mister Micawber.

I was perfect and complete.

Anonymous · Answer

Dilly dally

Rhyme

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