You know the construction that I am starting with –

I’m going to dinner with a friend.

A friend friend, or a friend friend?  

Paul Dickson, my slang mentor, named this playful phenomenon “word word,”  Linguists call it contrastive focus reduplication.  There are many scholarly articles about this. My favorite is the Salad-Salad paper by Jila Ghomeshi, Ray Jackendoff, Nicole Rosen, and Kevin Russell.

 

Several related constructions amuse me.

The RAS Syndrome, or redundant acronym syndrome syndrome, involves the use of the final word in an acronym after the acronym, thus redundantly.  HIV virus.  PDF portable document format) format.  Etc.

The recursive acronym is a self-referencing acronym.  Douglas Hofstadter used the term in 1979, inventing the acronym GOD meaning “GOD Over Dynn.”

It was a mainstay of early hacker humor.

My friend knew that I was working on this post using material that he had pulled together.  He came in pretty excited just as a I was finishing.

He read me this: “After three years of hand-selecting the best of future electronic beats out of France and America on their Filet Mignon series Point Point has proudly put out their first EP, Contrastive Focus Reduplication. Together, Aazar, Devoted to God, L’homme aux 4 lettres, and Nömak have succesfully showcased tremendous production diversity in curation as well as publication.”

I had a feeling that I knew what I was going to be listening to in a minute. First, what does he think of the post?