[Ads-l] Higgly-piggly

[Joel S. Berson]

Surely we're not forgetting the double dactyl?  Although allegedly it 
vastly postdates "higgledy-piggledy," the double dactyl makes the 
"higgledy piggledy" form much more prevalent than "higgly-piggly" 
(65,700 to 331 in Books, 339,000 to 14,500 in the Web).

Defined as:

Long-short-short, long-short-short
Dactyls in dimeter,
Verse form with choriambs
(Masculine rhyme):

One sentence (two stanzas)
Hexasyllabically
Challenges poets who
Don't have the time.

(Courtesy Wikipedia.)

Joel

At 12/13/2014 04:51 PM, Benjamin Barrett wrote:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
>I was surprised when my spell checker flagged "higgly-piggly," and 
>then found that the Mac Dic has it as "higgledy-piggledy."
>
>pinkfreud 
>(http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/778598.html) says 
>that the earliest citation is 1598, and the OED has "higly-pigly" 
>but evidently not my form. I dislike the OED's preferred 
>"higgledy-piggledy" because it adds an extra syllable.
>
>Wiktionary does not have "higgly-piggly" but Google raises some 14K hits.
>
>Benjamin Barrett
>Formerly of Seattle, WA
>
>Learn Ainu! https://sites.google.com/site/aynuitak1/home
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org