A Baffling Kerfuffle

I bet you chuckled a little bit inside when you read that title. "Kerfuffle" is quite an amusing word. There are probably many reasons for this: scarcity, number of syllables, the letter k, etc., but I maintain that a good part of its hilarity is thanks to the double f. Think about it. There's something innately humorous about the double f. Ruffle, miffed, fluff, doff, muffin, spliff; there's nothing overtly funny about those words, but they all sound a little bit silly.

So the double f is funny. Big deal. You might say the same thing about the double o. "w00t" owes much of its recent success to the double o in my opinion (or double zero, typographically speaking). But the double f is a much stranger case, because the double f sounds exactly the same as the single f; yet you don't laugh at words like rift, file, or safe. The single f is everywhere. It's ordinary. Why does adding the supernumerary f make a word so much more lighthearted? It's yet another conundrum in the often baffling field of — well, what would this be? Psycholinguistics, maybe? I don't know. Whoever ends up studying it might find themselves in a soundproof room, listening to various f sounds, when a fellow linguist, fed up with the study's inanity, barges in and bashes them in the head with a plush toy. In other words, they might find themselves in a muffled scuffle being buffeted by a fluffy ruffian.