"The _sum total_ of the world's knowledge: 250 exabytes"

[Ronald Butters]

Well of course the redundancy that people usually complain about is in sentences of the form, "A dead body was found yesterday on the Yale  campus."

On Feb 14, 2011, at 9:45 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:

> At 6:33 AM -0500 2/14/11, Ronald Butters wrote:
>> or "tiny little" or "big fat" or (used to be) "happy and gay" or
>> "dead body" -- the redundancy is emphatic/intensifying
>
> Some of these are less redundant than others.  To say that Robin's
> body is more attractive than his/her face is not to say that Robin's
> dead body is more attractive than his/her face.  Now "dead corpse"
> would be redundant, but "dead body" ain't necessarily so.  (For
> example, I often feel as though my body is falling apart, but if I
> felt as though my dead body were doing so I'd really be in bad shape.)
>
> LH
>>
>>
>> On Feb 13, 2011, at 3:27 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>>
>>> I wonder why this redundant term, an annoyance to prescriptivists
>>> since I was in grade school During The War, has become immortal,
>>> unkillable, whereas similarly-redundant terms of common occurrence in,
>>> e.g. my native dialect, such as _dusk dark_ and _clay dirt_, are
>>> unknown outside of the South.
>>>
>>> --
>>> -Wilson
>>> -----
>>> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"--a strange complaint to
>>> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
>>> -Mark Twain
>>>
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org