A Hurdy-Gurdy Update

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/

My books are Broken In: A Novel in Stories, Tsunami Cowboys, Grounded, and The Trail Back Out

Tsunami Cowboys was longlisted for the 2019 ScreenCraft Cinematic Book Award. The Trail Back Out was honored as 2021 IAN Book of the Year Award Short Story Collection Finalist for the Independent Author Network, and American Book Fest 2020 Best Book Award Finalist: Fiction Anthologies. The title story The Trail Back Out was longlisted for the 2021 ScreenCraft Cinematic Short Story Award. Broken In: A Novel in Stories was a semifinalist for the international 2020 Hawk Mountain Short Story Collection Award from Hidden River Arts, and named a Finalist for Greece’s international 2021 Eyelands Book of the Year Award (Short Stories).

Click here for my author page to learn more about me and purchase my books.

12 thoughts on “A Hurdy-Gurdy Update”

  1. 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!

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