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Words you don't need: 28 hilarious pleonasms you must know

Lawyers insist they need the full phrase to make its meaning absolutely clear

Last week we discussed pleonasms — the use of redundant words, usually in two-word phrases where one of the words is totally superfluous because it merely conveys a meaning that is already implicit in the other word. I gave a number of examples, from “tuna fish” to “young child” (and many more).

Many of the pleonasms I identified were self-evident, but some can be more complicated. When I was at the United Nations dealing with the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, the Security Council chose to declare some towns in Bosnia-Herzegovina as “safe havens”. Quite apart from the military feasibility of UN peacekeepers ensuring their safety, some grammarians thought the very term “safe haven” was a pleonasm — as one put it, “if it ain’t safe, it ain’t a haven”. In other words, a haven is by definition a safe place. But the diplomats who came up with the term could well have argued that they needed to call it a “safe haven” to remove any ambiguity about what they intended. Similarly, when lawyers use pleonasms like “cease and desist” and “null and void”, they are not impressed by grammarians telling them to delete the words “and desist” and “null and”, since “cease” and “void” are sufficient to convey the intended meaning; lawyers insist they need the full phrase to make its meaning absolutely clear.

The copy-editor Charles Harrington Elster identifies a number of familiar locutions (like “safe haven”) that might, on balance, pass muster even though they are pleonasms: “lag behind”, “personal opinion”, “protest against”, “filled to capacity”, “major breakthrough”, “best ever”, “brief summary”, “pick and choose”, “ultimate goal”, “root cause”, and “during the course of”. And some have justifiable rhetorical value in imparting emphasis, like the teacher or parent telling you, “never ever do that again”. But he is less forgiving of “future plans” (plans are always for the future), “past history” (history is always past), “please RSVP” (RSVP is a French acronym for “please reply”), “added bonus” (bonuses are always additional), and “the reason is because” (since the word “because” already means “for the reason that”).

There is another kind of pleonasm that has emerged in recent years — it comes from our contemporary fondness for acronyms. We all tend to add a redundant word to an acronym when we use it, like saying “PIN number” when we talk about our postal code in India. PIN is an acronym for Personal Identification Number, so the word “number” is already contained in the acronym itself. In other words, saying “PIN number” is like saying “Personal Identification Number number” — a pleonasm if there ever was one!

Among the most common of these acronym-related pleonasms is saying “ATM machine” (ATM is an Automated Teller Machine) and “LCD display” (LCD is an acronym for Liquid Crystal Display). People who do this are wittily described as suffering from RAS syndrome (Redundant Acronym Syndrome syndrome)! They include old-fashioned folks who say they possess a “PC computer” — a PC is a Personal Computer; strategists who solemnly warn of “ICBM missiles” (ICBM stands for Intercontinental Ballistic Missile); doctors who talk about patients having the “HIV virus” — that would mean “Human Immunodeficiency Virus virus” — and even all of us who routinely say we watched the CNN news network: CNN is already Cable News Network, so we are committing a double pleonasm, saying in effect that we’ve tuned in to the “Cable News Network news network”.

But it’s a “true fact” that you don’t need to be an RAS sufferer to make other common pleonastic errors — as this sentence has done: sorry, there’s no such thing as a “true fact” or a false one, a fact is by definition true. Journalists have often asked me if I would write an “autobiography of my life”. An autobiography can only be of my own life (if I wrote about someone else, as I’ve done about Nehru and Ambedkar, that would be a biography.)

In short, as the grammarian Arthur Quinn explains in Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase, “We know we have a pleonasm when we can eliminate words without changing meanings.” So here’s my simple advice for avoiding pleonasms: don’t use words whose omission would leave your meaning intact.

wknd@khaleejtimes.com