Pleonasm: A fancy name for a common practice
And it may be possible that there ain't nothing wrong with it
Photo (cropped) by CrowN on Unsplash
If there’s one thing I bang on about as a writing coach it’s the importance of keeping things simple. That includes preferring simple words to their fancier alternatives.
But if there’s one thing I’m an expert at, it’s ignoring my own advice, especially when writing for my own pleasure. Much as I admire good, honest Anglo-Saxon words, if I don’t throw a few fancy ones with a bit of French, Latin or Greek heritage into the mix as well I feel like I’m letting the side down. The side in question being me.
Hence this week’s word, which is defined as “a redundancy in language, using more words than are necessary to express an idea”. A definition which, when you think about it, is itself dripping with pleonasm.
Pleonasm dates from the 1580s and is from the Latin pleonasmus, which took it from Greek pleonasmos, “to be more than enough, to be superfluous”. Two hundred years later, pleonastic arrived belatedly on the scene calling out “did someone send for an adjective?”
Now, to be fair, pleonasm isn’t always considered a stylistic fault; it can serve a useful rhetorical purpose such as when you tell someone “I saw it with my own eyes”.
Tautological as it may be (who else’s eyes would you have seen it with?), a phrase like this provides an elegant dash of emphasis to your conversation. I mean, you could jump up and down, repeatedly and loudly asserting that you saw it, you could call your listener an idiot for doubting you, and you could do a million other things to make your point. But few of them would do so as neatly and compactly.
In fact, pleonasms are a baked in feature of language. No matter how much you value brevity, I’ll bet my house, my home and my dwelling that you use them regularly and, what’s more, that much of the time, you’re completely unaware of it.
If your spouse asks if you could help with the dishes and you - displaying the delightful wit of which you are possessed - reply “it could be possible”, that’s a pleonasm. If you talk about refugees finding a safe haven in a new country, discuss entering into a new contract, ask your partner to help you lift up a heavy box or tell a friend “I know that it was you”, you’re engaging in pleonasm.
It gets worse. Yesterday, when you gazed out the window and informed your partner “it’s raining” (instead of helping with the dishes as you suggested you might), it’s was a pleonasm. Sometimes called a “dummy pronoun”, the it in such phrases doesn’t refer to any thing. It’s a placeholder, put there to satisfy the requirement in English for every sentence to at least appear to have a subject. “Is raining” would do job just as well, but would also get you an F in English class.
Non-standard English often uses pleonasms to good effect too. When Mick Jagger sang “I can’t get no satisfaction”, he was engaging in multiple negation, a type of pleonasm and - despite the howls of indignation from 1960s language mavens around the non-teenage world - an unremarkable usage common to many English dialects and a mandatory feature of many other languages (as in the French je ne sais pas). David Byrne was a practising pleonasmist when he sang “I can’t seem to face up to the facts”, and he only ramped things up by later belting out “qu’est-ce que c’est?”, which translates literally as “what is it that it is?” (If you don’t know the song I’m referring to, you have a gaping hole in your education. Here’s a link.)
Given the benefits of being concise, which include making less effort than we would otherwise need to, why do we go to the effort of speaking redundantly? I mean, English speakers are notorious for lopping bits off words and sentences to save themselves the trouble of enunciating even small sounds. Iron used to be pronounced with a hard r until our ancestors decided that such exertion might prove fatal. The k in knee and knight was not always silent. And if you listen carefully, you’ll often hear even careful speakers pronouncing the letter t as a d in words like important, bottle, better and many more. Why? Because doing so saves the tongue from having to travel one millionth of micromillimetre further forward to the top front teeth rather than the palate.
Again I ask, why, then, do we tolerate pleonasm? If you’ve been paying attention (which I know you have, you diligent person), you’ll already know that one reason is emphasis. Emphasis has at least two benefits that I can think of. One, it can tell the listener something about your attitude, similar to when Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara that not only did he not give a damn, but “frankly, my dear”, etc. When you tell you listener you saw it with your own eyes, you’re not being specific (with my eyes, not someone else’s), you’re letting them know how certain you are of what you say.
Two, as all engineers know, a little built in redundancy can go a long way toward avoiding disaster or, in the case of language, ambiguity. Lawyers understand this principle all too well. Phrases like terms and conditions, null and void, and each and every are butt-covering taken to the nth degree. But don’t get too critical. When you tell your partner to put the water jug “on the table, over there”, even when there’s only one table you could be referring to, you’re making sure that you won’t have to ask twice. You may also be conveying something about your attitude - ie, you think your partner is stupid - but that’s another story for another day.
And, frankly, my dear, for another, far braver, writer than I.
Bits and specious
Further to last week’s item about the origins of the name Kylie, reader Murray Holdaway has forwarded this wonderful article about the city of Kyle, Texas, attempting to set a world record for the largest gathering of people sharing the same name. No prizes for guessing the name they chose.
On that note, congratulations to Murray for recently being named a Flying Kiwi in New Zealand’s Hi-Tech Hall of Fame. This achievement puts him in the same elevated company as Sir Ian Taylor (Animation Research), Sam Morgan (Trade Me), Frances Valintine (Mind Lab) and Rod Drury (xero).
After last week’s newsletter on lunch and luncheon, Reader Mike shared this early 1900s style guide from the Kansas City Star, where Ernest Hemingway worked from 1917 to 1918. So impressed was Hemingway with the guide that he said it contained “the best rules I ever learned in the business of writing.” In case you’re wondering the style guide says to write luncheon, not lunch, offering no explanation for this. (And, being an in-house style guide, neither does it have to.)
Finally, a graphic meme I can relate to.
Quote of the week
Anything you can do in excess for the wrong reasons is exciting to me.
Carrie Fisher
Some dialects reach a truly French level of pleonasm. One old Kentuckian I used to work with would say things like "Them there weeds there really did take and grow this summer."