If you use, or have heard of, the diagramming program OmniGraffle on the Mac, you might have wondered "What the
heck does graffle mean?"

Googling around, I found that the usual story is that it's a cool sounding nonsense word chosen to contrast with "Visio". The Wikipedia article on OmniGraffle quotes the former president of the company as saying as much.

The other day, I came across an idea that may explain why the name works so well.

I was listening to a Teaching Company lecture by John McWhorter about the changes in language. He happened to mention that "le", as in "dribble" was once a suffix denoting repeated action. For example, "drip+le" in Middle English, more or less, meant "repeated dripping"–or "dribbling". You can find a bit more about this online.

Which, of course, means that "graffle" would mean "repeated graphing". A perfect name.

I don't doubt that the word was made up as described, but I've always thought the name was better just a nonsense word. So maybe the linguistic construct just resonates with the scraps of language we have rattling around in our subconscious. Or maybe I'm just making it up.