Can you find the error in the following sentence? “The bells chimed dong, dang, ding.” Don’t dally-dilly thinking about it — you probably felt the offending phrase zag-zig through your gut with the intensity of a pong ping ball. Who in their right mind would say, “dong, dang, ding”? Everyone knows it should be, “ding, dang, dong.” Why? Well ... ‘cause. It’s just one of those secret English rules you didn’t know you always knew.
While there’s nothing grammatically wrong with calling your mom for a quick chat-chit or blasting your favourite jam on the hop-hip channel, you will be rightly mocked for uttering any of these flop-flipped phrases. And for that you can thank the rule of “ablaut reduplication” — a hidden formula all native English speakers know implicitly despite having never heard of it before.
Interior vowels of a word which are altered in repetition are called "ablaut reduplications". They give us phrases like tick-tock, riffraff, mishmash, sing song, King Kong, ping pong, dilly-dally, and shilly-shally.
And while you may not consciously realise it, almost every example of ablaut reduplication in the English language follows the exact same pattern, namely, “If there are three words then the order has to go I, A, O. If there are two words then the first is I and the second is either A or O." As to why this I-A-O pattern has such a firm hold in our linguistic history, nobody can say.
If you are a native English-speaker, you've known this rule your entire life — and never heard of it before now. Now you have, courtesy of a "wog", who had to learn it the hard way. But then again, life might have been simpler knowing that you know the rule without knowing it.
