Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Double speak

Wagga Wagga is a city of about 100,000 people in rural Australia. When you say the name, with the appropriate amount of throat gargling and nose snurgling, it sounds like crows talking to each other. In the local Australian Widadjuri aboriginal dialect, it means "the land of many crows".

I lived as a child at Greg Greg near the confluence of the Murray and Tooma Rivers, in the foothills of Mount Kosciusko, Australia's highest mountain. When spoken deep in the throat, it sounds like what it means, "the place of many frogs".

Then there is Grong Grong, not far from Wagga Wagga, which in Aboriginal-speak means "very bad camping ground" and Woy Woy, a dormitory suburb of Sydney, located on the Hawksbury River, which in the Darkinjung aboriginal dialect, means "much water."

Some of us have raised this figure of speech to even greater heights than its original purpose as an aboriginal numerical device.

Remember the cafe scene in the 1989 movie "When Harry met Sally" where she simulates an orgasm with "Yes! Yes! Yes!" to the amazement of her fellow diners, or the stuttering Jim Trott in the British TV sitcom The Vicar of Dibley who always says "No! No! No! No!" before he says anything else, usually "Yes!"

Question: What new arrangements of double words with surprising/amusing definitions/meanings/interpretations can you create/craft/generate? e.g. Mouth Mouth = loudmouth, Me Me - selfish.

No comments:

Post a Comment