In Act II of the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Hamlet is found in the library by Polonius where they engage in a conversation. At one point Polonius asks Hamlet what he is reading and his response is: “Words, words, words.”
It is one of my favorite lines from Willie the Bard, nothing is more succinct and to the point. Yes, Prince Hamlet could have replied with a simple one syllable “Words”, but as another late great Prince so aptly sang it in his song, “Joy in Repetition“:
There’s joy in repetition
There’s joy in repetition
There’s joy in repetition
There’s joy in repetition
If you read Alice in Wonderland (or saw any of the movies), you would know that the author Lewis Carroll used words that were unusual, to say the least. A word like curiouser appears to be poor grammar because it does not follow the standard rules of the English language. The -er ending is almost never used with words of more than two syllables.
According to the Old English Dictionary, the word curiouser was first used by Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland in 1865, as the phrase “curiouser and curiouser”. The OED cites this phrase only, and does not treat curiouser as a word by itself; the phrase has the meaning “increasingly strange”.
I think that by repeating the word twice, you are reinforcing it and expounding of the notion of curiouser, making what is already strange, stranger even still.
I like to look at “curiouser and curiouser” and see it as something that attracts your attention, something that you never saw before, like almost everything in the Alice books. Every new experience makes Alice think and that is what words do for me.
I enjoy researching the etymology of words, or word origins if you prefer. It can be fascinating to find out where words come from, how they evolve and their impact on our consciousness.
Always,
Alice Always