Fwd: just bad editing or non-native?

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu>
> Date: August 14, 2005 7:21:39 PM PDT
> To: wordseditor at worldwidewords.org
> Subject: Re: just bad editing or non-native?
>
> On Aug 12, 2005, at 5:32 AM, Michael Quinion wrote:
>
>> David Barnhart wrote
>>
>>> New York City wants restaurants to cut their list of ingredients
>>> - and
>>> maybe some waistlines - by eliminating out trans fats.
>>
>> Brits certainly don't use "eliminating out". The Guardian prints
>> errors like this fairly frequently. In this case, it looks like
>> somebody changed "cutting" to "eliminating", but forgot to remove
>> the following word.
>
> single occurrences are the devil to understand, especially if you
> have no access to the person who produced the original.
>
> this one could be:
>
>  - an instance of "piling on", a kind of pleonasm: the speaker/
> writer thought that "eliminating" wasn't enough, so expanded it
> with "out";
>
>  - a blend (in real time, as the expression was being produced) of
> "eliminating" and "cutting out";
>
>  - as michael quinion suggests, what i call a "cutnpaste" error, an
> artefact of editing at a keyboard.
>
> arnold
>
>