The History and Mystique of Double-Talking

By

Paul R. Meredith

Two of my daughters recently asked me to write down the history and methodology of Double-Talk for them, for what reason I do not know for sure. But being an obliging father, I agreed to do it, so this is what I remember from the early times of the language conversion of English to Double-Talk story.

I was in high school during the early fifties of the last century. I had a couple of close friends I spent most of my free time with, doing what high school boys do, whistle at girls, admire cars, sneak a smoke now and then, and in general be pests to most of the girls we would like to date. One of my friends said to me one day as we tried to whisper about a pretty girl in the hall, “I wish we could talk without the girls knowing what we’re saying about them.”

            “Yeah, that would be cool,” I responded, continuing to watch the attractive girl walk down the hall. “So why don’t we just invent our own secret language that nobody else can understand? That way we could flirt with the girls and they wouldn’t have a clue.”

            “Yeah, right,” he said as he snickered.

            “Seriously, I think I will work on it tonight,” I told my friend. I worked a full shift at the hospital as an orderly each weekday evening from four-thirty until one in the morning. I was busy most of the time at work, but there were a few times I could think while I waited on somebody to bring oxygen, or wait until someone finished using a bedpan so I could empty and clean it, or most any one of several other different things that happen with an orderly in a hospital setting. That first evening I had no ideas come to me regarding the secret language.

            The next day as I talked with my friend, I told him I thought we could either shorten our words in some fashion, or maybe elongate them. He thought it was a dumb idea, so we sort of dropped the idea for a week or two.

            One night at work I dropped a bedpan as I went to empty and clean it. “Damn, damn, double damn,” I said aloud. It was sort of my way to say things as I was attempting to cut down on my cursing at the time. But then it hit me like a ton of bricks as I started to clean up the horrible mess on the marble hallway floor. Damn, damn. I thought that maybe I could double up on the syllables and change a letter or two to confuse anyone listening to the point they would have no clue. I played with my idea that evening as I worked. At the end of the night I had worked out the start of my conversion of English into a complicated version of what I would eventually call, Double-Talk.

            My thought was to make the first syllable of a word end with a common letter. After some attempting of several letters I arrived at the letter l to use in this manner, and start the syllable again with an f. then repeat the syllable to end with the correct last letter (i.e., the single syllable name of Paul would still be Paul), but then repeating the syllable using the changed first letter but ending with the correct last letter (i.e., Faul). In Double-Talk, my name is PaulFaul. I worked with this idea for a day or two. It was quite a challenge to say a word with multiple syllables. In the case of my name in the foregoing example, the syllable never changes until you repeat it the second time, adding to the confusion. The word Mississippi for instance could be a nightmare to say in Double-Talk. I tried it a few times and eventually decided there had to be an easier way to invent a secret language, but in the end there was no easier method I could think of at the time, nor still today. While I won’t attempt to spell out the Double-Talk version of Mississippi here, I will tell you I can say it and you will be able to say it after a bit of practice, although it is a little tricky to do.

            I lived near my friend who initially agreed we should invent a new and secret language and we met at his house on Saturday, me with a pad of paper and a pencil in hand. We sat out in his dad’s garage, and before an hour passed, we had agreed on our new secret language. My method was exactly what the two of us agreed on and started putting into effect. I will attempt to explain it as simply as I can, so bear with me because it is a little shaky in spots.

            But first allow me to tell you that my friend and I started using Double-Talk the very same day we agreed on how to talk it. At school when we talked Double-Talk, the other students would stare at us as if we were speaking Greek of French. The girls would stand around to listen to us, my friend and me, as we talked it with each other. After a few days we practically left real English behind and used Double-Talk almost exclusively, except of course in class with the teachers present. They would likely have tossed us out of class had we tried to use it in the classroom.

            I will add that, while I can’t say my use of Double-Talk was the reason, my dating activity started to pick up, as well as that of my friend. 

Now, let us get back to Double-Talk. Take a word; let’s say the word is recall. So the word recall has two syllables to make this as simple as I know how. We take the first syllable, re; add an l sound at the end making it become rel. Now we double the same syllable and start it with an f, making it relfe, but now drop the l on the end. Next address the second syllable of call. We use the same process as before ending with callfall. When you put both syllables of the word together as Double-Talk, you say, relfecallfall. 

See how simple it is.

            An even easier word is the simple word, a. To convert to Double-Talk, the rules are the same as before. So the single-lettered word a becomes alfa in Double-Talk, making sure a is always pronounced as a long a.

            But of course, nothing is ever as easy as it first seems, so we have to address longer and more complicated words. Let us use the word, Saturday, and say it in Double-Talk. Here is my version in Double-Talk: Salfatulfurdalfay. Spelling words in Double-Talk can be a very complicated and even controversial topic at times. I don’t pretend to be an expert in this area.

            Now let us graduate to an even more difficult word, using the word, remuneration. Here we have five syllables, so it makes the conversion several times more difficult than the first words we used, which was recall and also a. Applying all the same rules as we did in the first word we used as our example, the word remuneration becomes relfemulfumelferalfatiolfion when using Double-Talk.

Admittedly it takes practice to make perfect as you attempt to use this new way of speaking to others, but if parents have children and they want to talk private matters in their presence, the use of Double-Talk can be a real handy tool for the parents. That is, until the kids start to catch on to the secret language, just as some of my own children did. A few of my children actually spoke Double-Talk around the house with me

            Another point I should make is that this Double-Talk method of conversing is much easier spoken than written, so if you have a mind to write with Double-Talk, I would encourage you to relfethilfink the situation over real good. You may discover that speaking Double-Talk will come easier over time while writing it will most assuredly never become easy. A really long word can be a difficult challenge to say in Double-Talk, so be careful what words you attempt at first. But eventually even the long words get relatively easy with practice.

I will say that I have used Double-Talk many times over the years with great effectiveness. Some of my children can speak some words of the secret language even today, many years after first hearing it spoken in the home.

There have been times in my life where Double-Talk was not a good choice for me to use. When I traveled in foreign countries where I didn’t speak the native tongue, I got along quite well with another language I invented. I created a one-hyphenated-word language that I used fairly effectively in several of the countries I visited. I call this my new universal language. It will cross almost any language barrier. That one word universal language was, Miko-mico. Try it sometime and see for yourself how well it works.

The End

Circa 1983