"_sum total_"

[Wilson Gray]

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 3:13 PM, geoffrey nunberg
<nunberg at ischool.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> I wonder if charging that 'sum total' is redundant would place one in the awkward position of having to explain why 'summa totalis' isn't.
>

You mean, by what means a prescriptivist could explain why it is that
there is no one-to-one-and-onto semantic mapping from contemporary
English back to 16th-C. Latin?

--
-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

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