Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Initial /p/ is everywhere in Dingburg today:

Alliteration in modern English serves mostly playful purposes — in tongue twisters (“Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers”), brand names (PayPal), formulaic expressions (pleased as punch), and the like. It was a standard poetic device in Old English, and is the basis for the occasional alliterative poems written today.

A related phenomenon is the use of stuttering in music, as in the Papageno/Papagena duet from the Magic Flute (“Pa pa pa …”). There’s an on-line collection of stuttering songs, of many different types, here.

This entry was posted on March 8, 2013 at 7:00 am and is filed under Alliteration, Language play, Linguistics in the comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.