Speaking of Words
By MICHAEL FERBER
“Alliteration,” as the origin of the word suggests (it has Latin littera “letter” in it), used to be defined as “beginning two or more neighboring words with the same letter,” but now we would say “with the same sound.” Kissing cousins and wrack and ruin are both alliterative phrases, despite their spellings. It is usually argued that all initial vowels alliterate, as in ins and outs and odds and ends. That is the rule, at least, in Old English and Icelandic poetry, which was built on alliterating stressed syllables, not on rhyme or syllable count, as modern poetry is.
Alliteration in poetry we will take up in another column. Here I want to bring out how widespread it is in more mundane speech, and consider why that is so.
First of all, alliterative phrases and whole sentences are fun to invent, and to try to recite quickly, as we see in tongue-twister contests. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, for instance, is fairly easy to say, but if you mix in two slightly different initial sounds it becomes much harder: she sells seashells by the seashore is trickier, and so is a proper copper coffee pot. Consonant clusters add to the fun, as in he threw three free throws, which all begin with a fricative + R cluster, one of which is anomalous and causes the most trouble when you say the sentence fast.
I don’t know if speakers of every language enjoy this kind of thing, but you can find examples in many languages by searching the web. Die Katzen kratzen im Katzenkasten means “the cats are scratching in the cat box” in German. Un chasseur sachant chasser sait chasser sans son chien means “a hunter who knows how to hunt can hunt without his dog” in French.
And here’s one in Finish: Pappilan apupapin papupata pankolla kiehuu, which means “the rectory deacon’s bean casserole boils on the oven.” (You never know when you might need to say that.)
Another common and pleasurable use of alliteration is to make insults or terms of abuse, such as lily-livered, first attested in 1857, or Shakespeare’s bolting-hutch of beastliness, and especially to string them together, as in You lousy little lily-livered lack-lustre lump of laziness!
But I think the most prevalent function of alliteration in everyday speech is to be found in little expressions that we hardly notice, so natural do they seem. Their seeming naturalness, in fact, may be due to our sense that words that begin with the same sound, like words that end with the same sound (as in rhyme), belong together. These expressions are sometimes comparisons: blind as a bat, busy as a bee, cool as a cucumber, dead as a doornail, dull as dishwater, fit as a fiddle, and many more. Most of them are apt enough, but a few seem driven by the sound alone, for what is notably fit about a fiddle?
Some are contrasting pairs: boom or bust, brain or brawn, do or die, fair or foul, feast or famine, friend or foe, love it or leave it, make a mountain of a molehill, naughty or nice, now or never, publish or perish, rags to riches, right and wrong, saints and sinners, sink or swim, sweet and sour, thick and thin, and most recently yum and yuk. These seem like twins, born together, though of course they evolved separately and had to be wedded by a creative match-maker.
Other sets are redundant, but serve to emphasize an idea by dwelling on it: bag and baggage, best and brightest, black and blue, bluff and bluster, born and bred, few and far between, forgive and forget, hale and hearty, house and home, hem and haw, hide nor hair, kit and caboodle, kith and kin, life and limb, and so on through the alphabet. Sometimes we use triplets, such as cool, calm, and collected.
Some adjective-noun pairs seem perfectly united, such as barroom brawl, crystal clear, fond farewell, pet peeve, spending spree, and temper tantrum.
So well ingrained in our language are phrases like these, though, that it is a good idea to avoid them altogether, especially in writing, where they come across as dull clichés, though some of them might make good names for a pair of dogs. We need new ones! If you can think of one, send it in and I’ll put it in a column with your name on it.
Alongside set phrases that alliterate, of course, are those that rhyme, such as bells and smells, referring to high-church rituals, boys and their toys, doom and gloom, eyes on the prize, go with the flow, huff and puff, hustle and bustle, and many more. It is not surprising to see that some of these could just as well be alliterative. The German equivalent of ants in your pants, for example, is the alliterative Hummeln im Hintern, which means “bumblebees in (your) behind”; I think I have never heard bees in your butt, but I’m sure it has been circulating somewhere. We do have bees in your bonnet, but that means something else. Also bats in your belfry, meaning something else again.
A basic assumption of modern linguistics is the “arbitrary nature of the sign,” that is, any sound can have any meaning. Baum, arbre, ki, and tree are very different in sound and origin, but they all mean “tree” in German, French, Japanese, and English. This assumption of arbitrariness makes light of onomatopoeia, the resemblance of some words to the sound it signifies, as in splash or boom, or to other features such as size, as in gigantic versus little. It also fails to take account of the playfulness of speakers of every language, speakers who enjoy alliterating, rhyming, punning, and inventing silly words like absquatulate and hornswoggled. These games gradually alter the language they are played in, making it a little less arbitrary and a lot more fun.
I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.
Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.