A Few Thoughts on the Salad Salad Situation

Or, how to win someone over with your cheeky opinions about reduplication.

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Also! I’ve made you a cryptic puzzle, which is at the end of this article. If you’re new to cryptics or want to brush up, my quick cryptic crosswords crash course begins here.

We aim to be useful as well as entertaining here at On Words and Up Words, so my goal this week is to prepare readers with a suave and alluring answer for the next time you’re out with a hot date who asks you what your favorite type of linguistic reduplication¹ is. It can be tempting in these situations to reach for the obvious answer and say Deprecative Reduplication — that’s anything with a “schm-”: “Table schmable,” “fancy schmancy,”  “deadline schmedline.” But I’ve found that conversation tends to flag after you’ve each named a few of your favorites. Putting a “schm-” in front of words sounds fun in practice, but it becomes tiresome more quickly than you’d think, especially if you make the fatal mistake of trying it with a word like “schmooze” or “schmaltz,” both of which will make you look like a real schmuck in hurry. 

Worse yet is to hit the panic button and say Baby Talk Reduplication — a little bit of “choo-choo,” a dash of “night night,” a sprinkle of “pee pee.” (Sorry, that last one was inartfully phrased.) I have nothing in particular against babies, but they are tiresome and bad conversationalists, neither of which are traits that you want to be modeling on a hot date. I count about six other responses you could give (at least as far as Reduplication in English is concerned), but if your goal is to impress without overplaying your hand, I’d like to put in a strong word for the cool new kid on the block (relatively speaking) — the imposingly named “Contrastive Focus Reduplication.” 

Also known as “Identical Constituent Compounding,” which doesn’t do it any favors at all, or “lexical cloning,” which is too scary to even think about, CF Reduplication is how we end up with the Salad Salad situation. This happens when you’re faced with a salad like potato salad, which is not a salad salad (don’t @ me; I think potato salad is the absolute tits), alongside a salad like caesar salad, which is a salad salad, affording you the unique and enviable opportunity to say, “Please pass the salad — the salad salad, I mean,” which shouldn’t make any sense at all, but somehow it does. While other reduplications are content to play fancy-schmancy little rhyme games² with one word or another, “Salad Salad” reduplication can reduplicate an entire discrete phrase and still be (more or less) intelligible. In addition to the salad (which comes from a famous paper on the topic), canonical examples of this phenomenon are “Do you like him, or do you like like him?” and “She’s rich, but she’s not rich rich.” But there’s no reason you couldn’t use its powerful effects for a majestically inane but somehow still comprehensible exchange like:

“Did you go to the grocery store and get eggs like I asked?”

“Well,  I didn’t go to the grocery store and get eggs go to the grocery store and get eggs, but I did draw you this nice picture of an omelet.”³

In fact, the effect of this type of reduplication — which is to contrast the prototypical version of a concept (e.g., green salad) with a nonstandard version of the same concept (e.g., potato salad) — can be achieved as long as you can imagine an alternative version of the concept, but it falls apart with words or units that are only there for syntax. The Salad Salad paper gives some interesting counterexamples to illustrate this. You can say “Are you sick, or are you sick sick?” but you can’t meaningfully say:

*“Are you sick, or ARE-are you sick?”

Other attempts at salad salad reduplication that don’t pass muster are: 

*“I didn't just read the book, I read THE-the book!”

A: “Did you go to Montreal?”

B: *“Well, not TO-to.”

There are a few other interesting rules that govern what you can and can’t salad-salad: For one thing, bits and pieces of plurals and past-tense indicators don’t necessarily get duplicated during the salad-salading process: “I didn’t just scream, I scream screamed” (as opposed to screamed-screamed) and “Some frat bros are fine, but frat bro frat bros are to be avoided at all costs” (as opposed to frat bros-frat bros). And the more familiar an idiom is, or the more commonly words in a phrase tend to be seen together, the easier it is to salad-salad the whole thing without sounding like a lunatic. “I’m going to let him have it let him have it” is broadly acceptable, but  *“I’m going to give John a right old talking to give John a right old talking to” feels completely wrong somehow, even if John deserves it.

Some languages take their reduplication very seriously, duplicating words or parts of words to do important things like creating plurals, and maybe we’ll get around to that one day in English, but not until we’ve done the hard, noble work of distinguishing the different types of salad from one another. Anyway, now I’m worried that you’re going to go out on a hot date and they’re not going to ask you what your favorite type of linguistic reduplication is, in which case this whole thing has been a waste of time. 

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Maybe you can talk about this cryptic crossword puzzle that I have made for you instead! The puzzle image is below if you want to print it out like our forebears used to, but you can also fill it in (and find annotated solutions) with a click! 

1. My Oxford dictionary of linguistics defines this as “A morphological process by which all or part of a form is repeated.”

2. A relatively famous modern example of reduplication is The Doctor’s description of time in Doctor Who: “A big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.” Wibbly-wobbly is a form of “ablaut reduplication,” which involves shifting vowel sounds according to a fixed pattern, which is why you can’t say “wobbly-wibbly” (see also, wishy-washy and ticky-tacky), and timey-wimey feels like a baby talk varietal, but it sounds impressive when David Tennant says it.

3.  I should note that the authors of the Salad Salad paper think this is wrong and that meaning can only be achieved if the phrase is idiomatic (i.e., “we’re not sleeping together sleeping together”): “Syntactically parallel but nonidiomatic strings cannot undergo CR,” they say. To which I say pooh pooh.