Why ’Tock-Tick’ doesn’t sound right to your ears.

The language rules we know – but don’t know we know.

Ever wonder why we say tick-tock, not tock-tick, or ding-dong, not dong-ding, King-Kong, not Kong-King?
Turns out it is one of the unwritten rules of English that native speakers know without knowing.
The rule is ‘If there are three consecutive words then the order has to go I, A, then O. If there are two words then the first one is I followed by either A or O.’ Mish-mash, chit-chat,dilly-dally, shilly-shally, tip-top, hip-hop, flip-flop, tic-tac, sing-song, ding-dong, ping-pong.
There’s another unwritten rule at work in the name Little Red Riding Hood.
Adjectives in English must be written in this order: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose, noun.
So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife … but if you mess with word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac.
That explains why we say “little green men” not “green little men,” but “Big Bad Wolf” sounds like a gross violation of the ‘opinion (bad), size (big), noun (wolf) rule, right? Not if you remember the ‘I, A, O order rule.
That rule seems inviolable: All four of a horse’s feet make exactly the same sound, but we always say ‘clip-clop’ never ‘clop-clip.’
This rule even has a technical name, if you care to know it, the rule of ablaut reduplication, but life is simpler knowing that you know the rule without knowing it.
You are utterly familiar with the rule of ablaut reduplication. You’ve been using it all your life. It’s just that you’ve never heard of it. But if somebody said the words zag-zig, or ‘cross-criss you would know, deep down in your loins, that they were breaking a sacred rule of language. You just wouldn’t know which one.
Reduplication in linguistics is when you repeat a word, sometimes with an altered consonant (lovey-dovey, fuddy-duddy, nitty-gritty), and sometimes with an altered vowel: bish-bash-bosh, ding-dang-dong.

This was almost all excerpts from a 2016 article in BBC.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20160908-the-language-rules-we-know-but-dont-know-we-know