In Mexico City recently, I heard someone say, ‘Eso me da ñáñaras.’ When I asked, a friend explained that ñáñaras describes a bodily unease, like when you shiver with the creeps. Or when we say something is ‘cringe’. The strange word, which felt like a jar on the nerves, delighted me. Another friend compared it to the heebie-jeebies. We started talking about words that wake our senses and ripple through our bodies, and I offered one from my first language.

In Telugu dictionaries you will find the word వంకర టింకర romanised in a number of ways including vankaratinkara or wankara-tinkara (the letter వ serves as both v and w). It sounds like wunker-tinker, with the first word pronounced like bunker, and a straightforward English equivalent might be ‘crooked’. A vanka is a crooked stick for threshing corn, or a rivulet. Nelavanka, literally the month’s curve, is a crescent moon. Vankaya is the crooked vegetable we know as eggplant. Vanka also works figuratively suggesting something twisted or warped, often signalling fault or blame. Someone speaking dishonestly might be said to speak vanka maatalu, or crooked words; vanka pettadam, to throw vanka, is to criticise.

I feel sufficiently studious when I explain the word wunker in isolation, but wunker-tinker fills me with glee. It can describe someone’s shaky handwriting or the zigzag parting in one’s hair. It might describe the way a drunkard walks or how a kid with their first bicycle careens this way and that through the streets. One of my favourite ways of thinking of wunker-tinker is ‘chaotic’. But even when wunker-tinker is used to chastise someone, it retains a comedic, exuberant effect. When you call someone chaotic, or better yet, a hot mess, you might disapprove, but there’s no denying they possess some allure.

Part of wunker-tinker’s appeal lies in its awkward sound. Tinker makes the word feel crooked: as if wunker were heading in one direction, and then tinker pulled it in another. Wunker is a word in its own right, but tinker has no meaning on its own. It follows along like a hype man – echoing and amplifying wunker, without changing its meaning.

Wunker-tinker is an example of what are called janta padalu or echo words – a form of linguistic reduplication. Most languages employ reduplication, whether exact (bye-bye), partial (flip-flop) or in echo words (higgledy-piggledy). In South-Asian languages, reduplication is especially common and can alter meaning – by intensifying a word (thondera thonderaga ra, come fast fast!), for example, or signalling duration (appudu, meaning at a certain time, appudappudu meaning sometimes). But its primary function is aesthetic, expressive, and inventive; it sharpens the tongue and enlivens the language. In echo words, the second part rhymes with or partially replicates the first word but may not have an independent meaning. For instance: illu gillu. Someone asks if you own a house and you snap back, Illu ledu, gillu ledu! I don’t have a house, I don’t have a schmouse!

Telugu makes ample, generative use of repetition, especially with words that appeal to the senses: gala-gala – the jingling of coins; tapa-tapa – small fruit falling; misa-misa – shining like a fish; gusa-gusa – someone is whispering rumours; kasa-kasa – they are chewing an unripe fruit; ghuma-ghuma – the fragrant smell wafting in from the kitchen; kutha-kutha – the crackling of rice as it finishes cooking; pitha-pitha – stickiness, the rice has been overcooked.

Such words and the rhythms and sensations they produce do not translate well between Telugu and English. I don’t mean to distinguish the particular music of Telugu – a vowel-heavy language – from that of English. I mean rather an affective relationship to sound and rhythm itself. Wunker-tinker and all manner of reduplicated words reveal the strictures of good taste in English. English has its share of such words: willy-nilly, namby-pamby, hokey-pokey. But these tend to be perceived as childish or indecorous, testing the boundaries of English decorum.

When English reduplications originate in other languages, the words often undergo a devaluation. Mumbo-jumbo is a prime example. ‘Maamajomboo’ likely referred to a ritual figure in the Mandinka language of West Africa, but as it entered English, the term became shorthand for nonsensical, suspect speech. Similarly, Hobson Jobson, the foundational dictionary of Anglo-Indian terms, takes its title from colonial mimicry of the sound patterns English officials heard in India. The Shia mourning chant, ‘Ya Hassan! Ya Hussein!’ took on a pejorative cast and eventually mutated into ‘Hobson Jobson’.

The colonial attitude towards the rhythms of Indian languages is not surprising: English embarrasses quickly around reduplication. The primary English form of improvisational reduplication, is the schm-, which comes from Yiddish. We can say Joe Schmo or fancy-schmancy, but also improvise: morning-schmorning or yellow-schmellow. Yet even here, the schm- can sound overly dramatic and, well, schmaltzy.

In Telugu, reduplication can be theatrical, but isn’t necessarily so. Echo words don’t feel déclassé, as they often do in English. Peppered through ordinary speech, they are also to be found in the highest literature. In contemporary English, rhyme can sit uneasy. Imagine a conversation in which a friend tells you that their morning was super-duper, or that their workday was easy-peasy: a word that might come to your own mind in response is ‘cringe’. Or even ñáñaras, a word with a sense of botheration about it. Whenever I said the word to someone in Mexico, a smile would flicker across their face. Like wunker-tinker, it produces an off-key enjoyment, a fleeting, complicit pleasure.