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I've noticed this happens across cultures as well, notably the German "Zack-zack" and the Indian "Fatafat"

These phrases seem to have a repeating motif of some sort; reduplication with "Zack-zack" and "Chop-chop", alliteration with "Ship-shape" and "Zip-zap", and what I can only describe as "internal consonance" with "Lickety-spilt" and "Fatafat"

They all amount to "Quickly", but I can't quite identify what aspects of theirs make them seem so naturally adapted for the expression, and I want to understand it, if only because the information would be quite useful to help create similar half-nonsensical phrases

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    It's not quite the same, but this observation immediately reminded me of Kiki/Bouba Commented Oct 15 at 17:02
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    I've never heard of shipshape meaning quickly, nor have some dictionaries I've checked. Is it a special context, or part of the world? Commented Oct 15 at 17:17
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    @DanGetz I heard it when visiting a friend of mine in an expat community in his hometown, if shipshape is really used only as "tidy" in general English, then I'd say it was quite likely influenced by his local dialect. The place he was in, I know of at least one instance where "neat" and "fast" are used interchangeably, sort of like "snappy" or "cut it fine" but used only with a more stern tone Commented Oct 15 at 18:14
  • zippy-zappy for me. Commented Oct 15 at 19:05
  • @ColinFine not quite the same, but definitely leads to this general sort of thing, which I'd file under sound symbolism (and there's a whole modern theory with a name I forge that, unlike suggested by traditional linguistics, many words are not just arbitrary in sounds, but despite languages evolving haphazardly, they still have a tendency to in some ways reflect the concept they refer to, the mechanism perhaps being that, among synonyms, speakers end up preferring the ones that "sound best" for the ceoncept). Commented Oct 15 at 22:23

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Since meaning in language is entirely arbitrary, if you can get someone else to agree with what a phrase or word means, you can create any word or phrase you like (as long as it fits the grammar rules of your language).

There are very few (if any) universal qualities across language, for every example of reduplication meaning "[thing]" there will be examples in other languages of reduplication meaning "not [thing]", or not meaning anything at all. I would say your noticing of that pattern across different languages is because you are predisposed to notice meanings you're already accustomed to. These things exist in your language, therefore they are particularly salient in other languages.

There may be some (loose) reasoning those phrases mean quick. The pattern of consonants and vowels makes them easy to say close together, and saying words quickly (in my language) modifies their meaning to have a "quick" attribute. But, this of course is just a descriptive observation, and you could not prescriptively apply the same observation to other languages.

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  • Downvoting because it seems to ignore the comments suggesting that there are indeed cross-linguistic concepts (which doesn't have to mean "universal" but just they are more likely to occur than by arbitrariness from random chance) that more or less fit the ideas in the question. The whole premise that everything in language is fully arbitrary is disputed, the "kiki-bouba" effect being a very obvious counterexample: although in and of itself it only involves perception, it brings about plausible theories about linguistic preference for some sounds with some meanings. Commented Nov 5 at 21:55
  • @LjL that is very informative, thank you. Do you know of any other counter examples other thank the "kiki-bouba" effect? I have heard of this but anecdotally, every time the youtube video says "Which word did you pick for that shape? Was it ____? Creepy right?" and I did not pick that word. Looking on the wikipedia entry I agree the "kiki" looks more sharp, but this feels very much like the mandella effect. When if I ask "is x true" I've already suggested and supplanted the idea that it is. I'm running out of characters so will continue my response in another comment Commented Nov 11 at 15:16
  • @LjL , Skimming through the wikipedia references I'm glad to find scientific articles about the subject. I cannot claim I have done in-depth research on this, but would like to quote Styles and Gawne (2017) abstract from their study which supports my belief. "In our study, speakers of Syuba, from the Himalaya in Nepal, do not show a preference when matching word forms ‘kiki’ and ‘bubu’ to spiky versus curvy shapes.... We believe these tests fail when the test words do not behave according to the sound structure of the target language." a Commented Nov 11 at 15:21

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