Nonsense vocable formulas have the following characteristics.They
are highly memorable as whole units,and are tenaciously retained
in exact copies even though they are spread widely in time over hun-
dreds of years and spread widely in space over diverse languages and
cultures.
Nonsense formulas have totally holistic meanings.The parts of the
formula are,in effect,meaningless.If asked,people cannot say if the parts
have any meaning at all.Meaning is attached to the entire,whole formula
and reflects the social function of the whole formula.The meaning of a
Havasupai snake venom-healing nonsense chant is its function in curing
a wound;the meaning of eeney-meeny-miney-mo is its function in count-
ing out potential players for a game.If contemporary nonsense formu-
las are good models for the first fixed formulas used in human talking,
let me suggest briefly how it was possible for people to become aware
of parts of formulas and use them in meaningful ways.Formulas that
were used frequently sometimes were much shortened by overuse.This
is a tendency in many spoken expressions:“God be with you”became
shortened to “good-bye”and then “bye.”“How are you doing?”became
shortened to “howdy.”Also,in formulas that were used frequently,some-
times a few noticeable or salient syllables,often the first or last two or
three syllables of the entire sequence,came to stand for the whole
formula.This ability of parts to stand for wholes is an important kind of
figure of speech.Later,these parts were pushed into the open slots of
entirely different formulas.Eventually,people became aware of and
came to use parts of formulas in meaningful ways.
Present-day nonsense formulas are tied together more strongly by
poetic parallelism features than most other spoken formulas.A huge
amount of alliteration,rhyme,parallelism of rhythms and forms help
them stick together and be memorable as whole units.Obviously,such
poetic redundancy was quite crucial for the earliest fixed formulas.Of
course,it is important to remember that many spoken formulas today,
including most normal,meaningful clauses we speak,still show huge
amounts of poetic parallelism and structuring;for example,“As good as
it gets.”
Some present-day nonsense formulas are laid out and structured in
open-slot variation formats.That is,whole lines of the formulas are
repeated,but at certain open slots variations occur.Exact repetition of
lines of formulas with variations at certain open slots was probably an
important early feature of fixed formulas.This was easily produced by
having interacting participants in talking-chanting,repeat each sequence
they had just heard as exactly as they could,but play around with vari-
ations or expansions at certain key points in the sequence.This is exactly311 On Rhythm,Repetition,and Meaning