One of the emails services I happily receive is One Word a Day. Last year I wrote a post about spotting a statue of the musician known as The Hurdy-Gurdy Man. Recently the word of the day was hurdy-gurdy, with this pleasing information:
hurdy-gurdy
noun
– a string instrument that produces sound by a hand-turned wheel rubbing against the strings
—
A LINGUISTIC CURIOSITY
“Hurdy-Gurdy” is a wonderfully, curious word combining euphony, onomatopoeia, and reduplication, all at the same time:
euphony = a harmonious succession of words having a pleasing sound
onomatopoeia = the forming of a word that sounds like the thing it represents (e.g. buzz, cuckoo, sizzle)
reduplication = repetition of a sound or syllable in a word (e.g. chit-chat, hocus-pocus, tip-top)
Let’s read that sentence again: “Hurdy-Gurdy” is a wonderfully, curious word combining euphony, onomatopoeia, and reduplication, all at the same time.
Man. Being a language geek doesn’t get any better than this!
NOTES: ©2022 Jadi Campbell. Uwe’s images from our trips and his photography may be viewed at viewpics.de. Click here for my original post: Hurdy-Gurdy. To subscribe to One Word a Day go to https://owad.de/
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I never knew what a hurdy gurdy was.
It looks as weird as it sounds!
At the Renaissance Faire we used to go to in northern New York (practically in Canada) there was a musical troupe every year where one of their instruments was a hurdy-gurdy. Nothing else sounds quite like it!
Yes – it’s one weird musical instrument!!
Mish-mash too, throw in a dash of alliteration ha!
kind of the perfect weird instrument and word, right?
Right!
And then there’s the automate à musique.
Just imagine an orchestra of these
A cacophonous thought!
This word is The Bomb!!:)
I was so excited when I got the Word of the Day entry for it