Argy-bargy
"A heated argument or dispute."
A Scots dialect reduplication, a pair of rhyming or near-rhyming words stuck together for emphasis, in the same family as phrases like "hocus-pocus." The original 19th-century form was "argle-bargle," itself likely built from "argle," an old dialectal variant of "argue," paired with "bargle" purely for the rhyme. Over time, "argle-bargle" softened into the more familiar "argy-bargy" without changing its meaning.
Sources: Recorded from Scots dialect in the 19th century as 'argle-bargle,' cited in the Oxford English Dictionary's entry for 'argy-bargy, n.'
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