Friday, November 2, 2007

Redundance

I was listening to the am radio station again on the way to work yesterday when Michael Savage, a talkshow host, said something that perked up my ears: "The best language is concise and clear." He was complaining about how so many of his listeners write ridiculously and unnecessarily long emails to him. Anyway, I thought about that statement and suddenly I realized how often redundant language is spoken; most of us say,"Can you repeat that again?" or "The reason why..." 'Repeat' already has the 'again' built into it just as 'why' is in 'reason'.

2 comments:

Pat said...

Yes indeed, Judy! We'll do something on redundancy today.

ceruleanjen said...

We do that a lot with acronymns, too -- PIN number, HIV virus, etc.