You hear it more and more often, especially among young people: by simply repeating a word they give that word a different shade of meaning. How is that possible?
For example, a woman says she has met a man she “likes.” Her friend then asks: “Do you mean nice or nice-nice?” ‘Nice’ can be anything: from ‘oh, nice’ to ‘really nice’. ‘Nice-nice’ only means the latter, with the undertone probably: nice enough to start something with.
If you double a word ‘X’ to ‘X-X’, the result means something like ‘really X’ or ‘typical X’. A ‘student-student’ does not just study (like any ‘student’) but also behaves like the prototype of a student: he or she lives in rooms and fully enjoys student life. And ‘coffee-coffee’ is: coffee as coffee should be. Depending on who says it, this means: espresso or filter coffee, and in any case not decaf, because that is fake coffee.
According to Geert Booij, professor emeritus and specialized in word structure and word formation, reduplications are very common in languages worldwide. “But especially here in Europe, in the Germanic and Roman languages, it is very rare.”
You would think this is how it works: you repeat a word, you say it and then you say it again. But that’s not how these doublings work. It is not the case that the first half is followed by the second half, but the other way around: the second part is the core of the word and the first part is then added to it, placed before it, with all its consequences for the meaning.
Restrict and tighten
You can see that it works this way, for example, in this sentence: “My hair is not really red-red, but reddish red.” A sentence with ‘red’ in it three times. The second and third ‘red’ refer to everything you can call red between orange and purple. But the first ‘red’ refers to protypical red, that is, fire red. Booij puts it this way: “In red-red, the first ‘red’ is a further determination of the second ‘red’.”
It also works that way in ‘student-student’. Just as in ‘mathematics student’, for example, the second part is the core of the word and the first part ensures that the meaning of that word is considerably limited and sharpened. In other words: within the (large) collection of ‘students’, ‘mathematics students’ and ‘student-students’ are (smaller) subsets.
Doublings take advantage of the fact that you can always use words in different shades of meaning: a general, broad meaning or a very specific, prototypical meaning. An example of this well-known in linguistic circles can be found in this statement: “The blackbird and the penguin are both birds. But a blackbird is more of a ‘bird’ than a penguin.” Because the blackbird (which flies and sings) is a prototypical bird, and the penguin is not.
Doubles such as ‘red-red’ and ‘student-student’ can also be found in English and German, says Booij. We can therefore speak of an international phenomenon. Four American linguists already wrote one in 2004 famous article about, with the title The salad salad paper. Because in the US they seem to know a distinction between a ‘salad’ and a ‘salad-salad’.
In the Netherlands, the doubling is often written with a dash: ‘leuk-leuk’. Booij thinks that there is no official spelling rule yet, because then the spelling committee would have to consider it first. On the internet you now also come across the spellings ‘leukleuk’ and ‘leuk leuk’.
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