The other day, the New York Times ran an article called “Tax Tax Revolution,” playing off the title of the popular video game Dance Dance Revolution (once known by the more prosaic title Dancing Stage). [Which makes me wonder if Super Mario Brothers was originally Jumping Fraternal Twins, or if Zero Wing was ever simply Funny Introduction.]

The appeal of the XXY name scheme is immediate yet hard to explain. Merely repeating a term (”Dance Dance”) is not, I don’t think, the source of the pleasure of the name. It is, rather, the juxtaposition of the perfect, symmetrical, duplicate set of terms (a term and its echo) with the imperfect dangler, the rude awakener—la Revolution, for instance. (The bullet of revolution has no echo.)

Nothing quite does the XXY construction right like Smile Big Smack Hamster, a favorite of mine in two categories—television shows and Japanese nonsense.

In SBSH (which could have should have wasn’t named Smile Smile Smackham, or Smack Smack Smilester), players strapped into giant hamster costumes chant along to a beat, answering the host’s call of “[Color 1], [color 1], [color 2]!” with appropriately colored nouns.

For instance, “Yellow, yellow, gray!” may be answered, on beat, with “Lemon, lemon, elephant!” Or “Red, red, green!” may yield “Blood, blood, leaf!”  (If I wrote the show, I would throw down the C-bomb and ask for “Chartreuse, chartreuse, glaucous!“)

The XXYs continue, full-tilt, until a player messes up three times, at which point said player is shot through a giant sculptural cat’s mouth, replete with a huge felt tongue covered in hot pepper or mustard…

Now, how the hot-hot-fire eye irritant relates to the creation of XXY gestalt nouns, I don’t know.

But I like.