The lepo lepo can be described as that which the hetererosexual scoundrel without a car and without money possesses and which pleases all his mating partners. The double meaning of the reggae lyrics reinforces the phallic symbol aspect of the reduplicated word. In English, it would be translated as “mojo”, also a neologism. It is an erotic quality intrinsic to its holder. O lepo lepo pode ser descrito como aquilo que o pé-rapado hetererossexual sem carro e sem dinheiro possui e que agrada a todas as suas parceiras de acasalamento. O duplo sentido da letra do reggae reforça o aspecto de símbolo fálico da palavra reduplicada. Em inglês, seria traduzido como “mojo”, também ele um neologismo. Trata-se de uma qualidade erótica intrínseca a seu detentor. Here is a commentary about it as, according to the author, a barbaric neologism. There’s more, including a graph and an audio file, at the link. It helps that new reduplicated words appear all the time, while old ones change their meaning or gain currency. But in the past two decades it has started to get more attention. Reduplication, a mostly oral tradition, was hardly studied in Brazil until the turn of the 21st century. “Brazilians use language to make a hard life more fun,” says Mr Araújo. For example, in the Maré favela in Rio de Janeiro in the 1940s, residents attached a rubber tyre to a wooden barrel to bring water from Guanabara bay and called it a “rola-rola”, from the verb “to roll”. Reduplication came in handy to name new things in a new world. The urge to reduplicate may reflect a culture that is younger, less conservative and more open to experimentation, some surmise. Some examples are thought to be the result of exposure to hundreds of indigenous and African languages, in which reduplication is common. In addition to the onomatopoeia of everyday speech, Brazilians use reduplication when talking to children (“au-au” has become a synonym for dog) and as pet names for relatives (“vovó” is a nickname for “avó”, or grandmother “titi” for “tio”, or uncle). In Brazilian Portuguese, reduplication appears to have produced more, and more varied, words than its European counterpart. Many, however, are what Gabriel Araújo of the University of São Paulo calls “pseudo-reduplication”, in which the base that is doubled is an onomatopoeic sound rather than a word with meaning, resulting in words like “pi-pi”, birdcall, and “zum-zum”, the buzz of mosquitoes. According to a paper in 2019 by Antonia Vieira, a Brazilian linguist, the first Portuguese dictionary, compiled by a priest in the 1700s, contains 44 examples. The origins of reduplication in Portuguese are hard to pin down.
“Choro” (crying) becomes “chororô” (cry-fest or a crybaby). In other cases, the last syllable of a noun is replicated to add intensity. “Lambe” (he licks) becomes “lambe-lambe” (poster). For example, “empurra” (she pushes) becomes “empurra-empurra” (jostling crowd, or moshpit). In most cases, the third-person singular form of a verb is repeated to form a noun with a related meaning. “We play around with words, and end up making new ones,” says Márcio Victor, the lead singer of Psirico. Its construction, a loose example of what linguists call reduplication, a way of forming words in which an existing word or part of a word gets repeated, is common in Brazilian Portuguese. It turned out that the phrase was unfamiliar outside Bahia, the north-eastern state where Psirico, the band, is from. Some people guessed that it was slang for penis (it is actually slang for sex or sexual prowess). “I use it a lot, but I don’t know,” one man admitted. Most Brazilians had no idea what “lepo lepo” meant.Ī talk-show host put the question to strangers on the street. If the woman stays, the singer belts over a thumping drum, it is because she likes his “lepo lepo”. A man wonders whether a woman will still love him after he loses his job, his house and his car. The song, a hit at Brazil’s carnival in 2014, starts like any other. The Economist (no author given) reports ( archived) on an interesting aspect of Brazilian Portuguese:
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