Repetitious and Redundant
Monday, 26 July 2010
CNN.com | July 21, 2010: “One man’s duplication is another man’s competitive analysis,” Clapper said of the newspaper’s assertion that there are excessive redundancies within the nation’s intelligence agencies.
CNN.com | July 19, 2010: We work constantly to reduce inefficiencies and redundancies, while preserving a degree of intentional overlap among agencies to strengthen analysis, challenge conventional thinking, and eliminate single points of failure.
CNN.com | June 25, 2010: The film spends so long running around in ever-increasing circles, it seems to forget where it wanted to go with these characters, and the third act forfeits on its promise of reversals, settling instead for repetition and redundancy.
CNN.com | June 20, 2010: At the same time, Gates has led an administration effort to refocus Pentagon spending by cutting what he considers to be redundant or unnecessary projects and programs.
And that’s in just a 30-day period on one major news website. Our appetite for verbiage truly is insatiable. Now, which is worse: repetitious redundancy or using redundancy as a synonym for useless?
— Otto E. Mezzo
References: http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/07/20/senate.clapper.hearing/index.html?iref=allsearch
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/07/19/report-u-s-intelligence-community-inefficient-unmanageable-2/?iref=allsearch
http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/Movies/06/24/knight.day.review/index.html?iref=allsearch
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/06/20/gates-spending-issue-could-cause-veto-of-dadt-bill/?iref=allsearch&fbid=JXQd5jZq3jE
No. 1 — July 26th, 2010 at 11:30 am
[...] My search of CNN.com underscores how vital it is we use our words correctly and not scoff, as so many do, at shifts in meaning. Case in point — the only reason the word wasn’t more abused this past month was the prevalence of BP officials touting the redundancies they had in place. They probably thought redundancies were “useless” too, and shut them all down. [...]
No. 2 — August 17th, 2010 at 12:45 pm
Perhaps you will enjoy my coinage for excessive language. It stems from a phrase I used “the conversational equivalent of styrofoam packing peanuts.” I abbreviated that to just “packing peanuts,” and later just “peanuts.” Now when I am going through something I wrote, looking for words to remove, having spotted a word or phrase to be edited out, I will shout “peanuts!” Then, I will hit the delete key and remove the offending material. I’m not thinking this will catch on, but it does help to break the tension in a room with just myself, a computer and a ton of work to be done.