We like doubling up words in English.  Sometimes these rhyme; (backpack, airy fairy, hurdy gurdy, doom and gloom, funny money, namby pamby); others involve alliteration (spick and span, topsy turvey, toil and trouble, head over heels, rock ‘n’roll); or there may be just a vowel change (hip hop, zig zag, criss cross, chitter chatter, tittle tattle, mish mash, splish splash, ping pong, ding dong).

So when the Libyan politician Moussa Boussa turned up in Britain in late March the satirists and cartoonists rubbed their hands with glee. Martin Ronson, in the  Guardian of April 1st, did a riff on Moussa Boussa (see above) in which he introduced Ken Clarke, veteran politician and former director of  British American Tobacco, as Sparky Clarkey;  David Cameron, old Etonian Prime Minister, as Feudal Poodle; and William Hague, bald-headed Foreign Secretary, as Vague Hague. (This latter rhyme had in fact, for many years, featured in one of the most memorable advertising slogans - for a well-known brand of scotch whisky: Don’t be vague, ask for Haig.)

This love of doubling up words hasn’t, of course, started in our time. The title of this piece comes, as you doubtless know, from the start of Act IV of Macbeth - or The Scottish Play, as actors would have it - where the Three Witches, stirring away at their hell-broth brew, intone:

        Double, double toil and trouble;

        Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

That has it all: three rhyming words and two examples of alliteration just in a short couplet. And the description of the contents carries on the sound play: fillet of a fenny snake, in the cauldron boil and bake; lizard’s leg; boil and bubble; gall of goat; birth-strangled babe; ditch-delivered by a drab; baboon’s blood.

When looking out examples of this kind of word-play for Rhymes and Rhythm, I realised that a large number start with the letter ‘h’, corresponding in English (though not, for example, in French, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese) to the sound /h/.   I’ve already noted hurdy gurdy, head over heels and hip hop, and here are a few more:

            hale and hearty, hanky panky, helter skelter,

            higgledy piggledy, high and mighty, hurly burly,

            hocus pocus, harum scarum, huffing and puffing,

            (by) hook or by crook, hooray Henry, hunky dory,

            hugger mugger, hoighty toighty, hubble bubble,

            hot spot, hotch potch, hitch hike,

            hells bells, humdrum, hi-fi,

            hoo-ha, heigh ho,  hob-nob.

What we don’t have very often in English are set expressions featuring a repeated word (softly softly is the only one that comes to mind, though I am sure that there are others).  Words can be repeated, of course, and we may do so in order to imply that we are referring to a genuine version of the thing in question.  For example, if someone offers me coffee I might say ‘Do you have COffee coffee?’ (with the main stress on the first ‘coffee’), implying that I don’t particularly like instant coffee.  Or if asked whether I wear hats I might say ‘I don’t really wear hat hats, just something to keep the sun off occasionally’.

Intriguingly, the Spanish do something similar, but with the main stress on the second element. I particularly remember, on an August visit to Spain, going into a hatters (a sombreria) to buy a hat (a sombrero, of course).  The owner of the shop asked me if I wanted  un sombrero somBREro o un sombrero de veRAno? (= a HAT hat, or a SUmmer hat?).  I must ask my Spanish friends some time if they can ever say un cafe caFE as the equivalent of a COffe coffee.

I haven’t come across this ‘genuineness’ use of repetition in other languages (though I am not saying that it can’t happen).  What I have noticed, in Italian, however, is that adjectives can be repeated as a form of intensification, the equivalent of adding ‘very’. 

In Venice I was in a men’s clothing shop comparing two pairs of apparently similar trousers, one of which was noticeably more expensive than the other.  When I asked why this was so, the salesman, rubbing the cloth of the pricey one, urged me to feel it, exclaiming that it was ‘morbido MORbido!’, with main stress on the second element. (No, morbido doesn't mean ‘morbid’, but ‘soft’, as well as ‘tender’, of meat, ‘mellow’ or ‘delicate’; for ‘morbid’ you need morboso).

To find a language which embraces this doubling up of words with at least as much enthusiasm as English, you have to go to Turkey. But that will be for another time.