A.Word.A.Day --razzle-dazzle

A.Word.A.Day

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Mar 16, 2020

This week’s theme
Reduplicatives

This week’s words
razzle-dazzle
hobnob
artsy-fartsy
flimflam
lardy-dardy

Previous week’s theme
Yours to discover

A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

Reduplicate, reduplicate, reduplicate! That’s what this week’s words seem to believe in. It’s not enough to say it once. No, oncey-woncey! Do it again and then we have a winner: a reduplicative, a word coined by repeating the word, but usually changing it in some way, a letter or a syllable, for example. That’s how we get teeny-tiny, hoity-toity, and blah-blah.

This week we feature five more reduplicatives. What reduplicatives have you coined? Share them below or email us at words@wordsmith.org. Include your location.

razzle-dazzle

PRONUNCIATION:

(RAZ-uhl daz-uhl)

MEANING:

noun: Noisy excitement, showy display, or extravagant actions, especially when executed in an effort to distract or confuse.

ETYMOLOGY:

A reduplication of dazzle, frequentative of daze, from Old Norse dasa (weary). Earliest documented use: 1885.

USAGE:

“Donal Keating, a physicist who leads Microsoft’s forensics work, has turned the lab into an anti-piracy playpen full of microscopes and other equipment used to analyze software disks. ... The grand question surrounding Microsoft’s anti-piracy razzle-dazzle is whether it’s worth the cost.”
Ashlee Vance; Chasing Pirates: Inside Microsoft’s War Room; The New York Times; Nov 6, 2010.

See more usage examples of razzle-dazzle in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects? -James Madison, 4th US president (16 Mar 1751-1836)

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