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Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia invoked a curious term in his fierce dissent of Wednesday's ruling that struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, calling it a "legalistic argle-bargle," which sounds like a made up word if we've ever heard one, but was actually a carefully chosen phrase of disgust. It originates from the Scottish "argy-bargy" — an even sillier expression — which, according to Meriam Webster means a "lively discussion." Other places describe it as "a relatively amicable, if somewhat heated, argument" and "an argument or confrontation of moderate intensity, somewhere between a spirited debate and a fistfight." In other words it's a very Supreme Court justice way to describe a disagreement. But why such a silly term for the court record books?

"'Argle-bargle' is formed by what's known as rhyming reduplication," linguist Ben Zimmer told The Atlantic Wire. "Reduplication," is when "a word formation process by which some part of a base (a segment, syllable, morpheme) is repeated, either to the left, or to the right, or, occasionally, in the middle," as the Lexicon of Linguistics explains it. So, it's like okey-dokey or mumbo-jumbo.