[Lightning Bug]

I'd like to start a light-hearted look at redundancies. Let's post some we have noticed, or are long-time pet peeves, or that we aren't sure are, but think they should be. Discussion and debate is welcomed.

I'll start with one I'm not sure of, but I have argued it to be, from multiple alma maters: "conquer and prevail".

I've also argued that "fend for yourself" has reached the stage, as you never hear fend used elsewise.

Bugsy

[Julie Steiner]

"on a mountain high"! High is kinda the definition of a mountain, no? If it weren't high, it would be a hill.

Also, since my daughter is learning to drive, the phrase "bring the vehicle to a full and complete stop" comes to mind. I've yet to see a full stop that wasn't complete, or vice versa.

My church choir director is forever inviting the congregation to "join together" in singing hymn number such-and-such. A minor annoyance, but it really sets my teeth on edge after the fourth or fifth time I've heard it in an hour.

[Edited to add: This is the opposite of a redundancy, but a few days ago I had to look up the definition of "perspicuous," and felt betrayed. Definitely a case of false advertising.]

[Rob Stuart]

Supermarkets advertising 'pre-prepared' salads. This should be a capital offence.

[Ann Drysdale]

I'm afraid I am one who thinks these things into a sort of inner peace. Bringing the vehicle to a full stop? Brake on, no forward motion. To make that stop complete, one must apply the handbrake and switch off the engine. Innit?

Yesterday I was forced to listen, yet again, to a group of folk on a train howling against the phrase in the tannoy announcement "the next station stop will be..." One of them actually shrieked "aaagh! I hate that - station and stop are the same thing!" I rose from my seat like a pantomime fairy and bellowed "Oh, no they're not!"

"Think," I growled "about what he actually said" - We are now approaching Cardiff Central; Cardiff Central will be our next station stop.

Trains often stop before pulling into stations. They wait to be swtiched onto the right track for the platform, they may have to wait for another train to go out before they can come in. Even with the announcement I have seen folk panicking because the train is stationary and the doors appear to be jammed...

What is needed to make all plain is for the train manager to stress the line correctly and, failing that, for the passengers to use a little common sense.

Mountain high is harder to justify. I immediately thought of the song lyric wherein I have always believed in the invisible hyphens; river-deep, mountain-high.

The difference between a hill and a mountain is a source of harmless ho-ho in a film about canny Welsh folk outwitting an English person (which is always good for a laugh round here) and suggests that there is an argument for graduations of mountainness that would allow of high ones as distinct from barely-to-middling ones on the way to it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_En...n_a_ Mountain

However, putting the high after the mountain looks suspiciously rhyme-driven to me.

[Adrian Fry]

Ann, thank you for your lucid justification of the 'station stop' announcements: I'll never gripe about them again.
I am somehow enraged by the train having to come 'to a complete stand at the platform'. Is the train going to rear up on its hind carriages to bring this about?
There is always the feeling with railway announcements that the men writing or saying them are struggling excessively to formalise phrases that might otherwise sound natural. And all the staff sound adenoidal and have accents that suggest they were brought up in Slough but once overheard an elocution lesson.

[Ann Drysdale]

I believe they used the perfectly comprehensible (to me) phrase "a complete standstill" until someone perceived that as tautology.

Anyway, it only applies to those awful trains where you have to lean out of an opened window to depress a handle on the outside of an outward-opening door. The Zen doors that say "press when illuminated" are under the control of the conductor so that passengers cannot be prematurely ejaculated.

[Martin Parker]

totally, wholly, absolutely, utterly, entirely, . . . . etc. UNIQUE !

[George Simmers]

I always mutter on a train when asked to ensure that I take all my personal belongings with me. What about my impersonal belongings? (A volume of poems with a classicist bent, for example?)

[Brian Allgar]

A "pet peeve" of mine: the superfluous and ungrammatical "as" used by people who are incapable of distinguishing between two different constructions:

xxI am not as big as he is

xxxxand

xxBig as I am, he is bigger

and who, in the second case, insist on writing

xxAs big as I am, he is bigger.

[Brian Allgar]

Originally Posted by George Simmers

I always mutter on a train when asked to ensure that I take all my personal belongings with me. What about my impersonal belongings? (A volume of poems with a classicist bent, for example?)

George, I think it's to discourage kleptomaniacs from taking other people's belongings with them.