Posts Tagged: reduplication

  • Ward Cunningham in Hawaiian shirt in front of the Wiki Wiki Shuttle bus (photoshopped image by Madrigal Communications)

    Wiki wikipedia

    Words on my Hawaiian holiday We recently had a holiday to Hawaii, which was a big tick on the bucket list. My wife and I had spent three hours in transit at Hawaii Airport 25 years ago wishing we could have seen a bit more. Arriving in Honolulu International Airport, I noticed that the shuttle […]

  • Madrigal Communications word of the week bauble a Christmas tree decoration

    Pretty, pretty Christmas baubles

    When I was a boy living in Scone, in country NSW we still had a traditional Christmas along the lines of that which my parents had had growing up in England. This meant two things: firstly, that we sat around at midday on Christmas Day in sweltering heat (we had no air conditioning, see below) […]

  • Mickle is a Yorkshire word still found in place names Micklethwaite (meaning great piece of land or meadow), Micklegate in York (great street) and Mickle Fell (great mountain or hill).

    MICKLE—a once great word

    Many a mickle makes a muckle, is a saying from the north of England (1). In Scotland: a wheen o’ mickles mak’s a muckle was recorded in the late 19th century (2). A Jamaican website reports a current Jamaican saying as: Every mickle mek a mockle (3). Mickle is a very old word which has survived fossil-like […]