Tautology (rhetoric)

This article is about use of redundant language. For the technical notion in formal logic, see Tautology (logic).

Tautology (from Greek tauto, "the same" and logos, "word/idea") is an unnecessary repetition of meaning, using dissimilar words that effectively say the same thing (often originally from different languages). It is considered a fault of style and was defined by Fowler as "saying the same thing twice", if it is not apparently necessary or essential for the entire meaning of a phrase to be repeated. If a part of the meaning is repeated in such a way that it appears as unintentional, or clumsy, then it may be described as tautology. On the other hand, a repetition of meaning which improves the style of a piece of speech or writing is not necessarily described as tautology.

A rhetorical tautology can also be defined as a series of statements that comprise an argument, whereby the statements are constructed in such a way that the truth of the proposition is guaranteed or that the truth of the proposition cannot be disputed by defining a dissimilar or synonymous term in terms of another self-referentially. Consequently, the statement conveys no useful information regardless of its length or complexity making it unfalsifiable. It is a way of formulating a description such that it masquerades as an explanation when the real reason for the phenomena cannot be independently derived. A rhetorical tautology should not be confused with a tautology in propositional logic, since the inherent meanings and subsequent conclusions in rhetorical and logical tautologies are very different.

Tautology and pleonasm

Tautology and pleonasm are not the same thing. Pleonasm is defined as "the use of more words than those necessary to denote mere sense." A round circle. A big giant. Tautology is a repetition of the same idea in different words: A huge great big man. Say it over again once more. (Say it over. Say it again. Say it once more.) The crucial difference is that "Repeat it again" is a pleonasm, because again is inherent to "repeat". Repeat and again do not simply mean the same thing, which means that this is not a tautological repetition of the same thing in a different word – just as tuna and fish are not the same thing.

The expressions like added bonus, first introduction, free gift, round circle etc. are pleonastic rather than tautological. Why? Because these expressions do not convey the same meaning in different language. Instead, one idea is simply contained in the other. For example- They arrived one after the other in succession is tautology because 'one after the other' and 'in succession' convey the same sense in different languages, while in 'added bonus' added and bonus do not mean the same thing, only one idea is implicit or contained in the other. Consequently, expressions like 'added bonus', 'reason why', 'repeat again' etc. should be pleonastic rather than tautological. Besides, the expressions like 'annual exams every year' should be tautological.

Repetitions of meaning in mixed-language phrases

A sign in Albuquerque, New Mexico, marking the location of a ravine named Arroyo del Oso ('Small Canyon of the Bear') in Spanish, and Bear Canyon in English. The sign's phrasing "Bear Canyon Arroyo" thus means 'Bear Canyon Small Canyon'.

Repetitions of meaning sometimes occur when multiple languages are used together, such as: "rice pilaf" (pilaf is Turkish for "rice"),"chai tea" (tea tea), shrimp scampi (scampi is Italian for shrimp),"the La Brea Tar Pits" (the The tar Tar Pits), "the hoi polloi" (the the many), "Sierra Nevada mountain range" (Snowy Mountain mountain range), "Sahara Desert" (Deserts Desert), "Gobi Desert" (Desert Desert), "shiba inu dog" (little bush dog dog), "shiitake mushroom" (shii mushroom mushroom), Jirisan Mountain" (Jiri mountain mountain), "Mississippi River" (Great-river river), "Rio Grande river" (big river river), "cheese quesadilla" (cheese cheesy-thing), "Lake Tahoe" (Lake Lake), "Faroe Islands" (Sheep Island Islands), and "Angkor Wat temple" (Angkor Temple temple). A triple redundancy example is "Breedon on the Hill" in Leicestershire (Hill-hill on the hill").

The tautological status of these phrases is somewhat subjective and can be harder to detect than monolingual varieties, since they are only perceived as tautologous by people who understand enough of each of the involved languages, and because of the way that words change meaning as they drift from one language to another. For example, chai is Hindi for "tea", but in the United States, where the phrase "chai tea" is common, what is referred to as "chai" is more precisely "Masala chai."

Similar examples of repetitions occur when multiple languages are used in the same geographic area, even when the populations are generally well aware of the meaning of the redundant words. In bilingual (French and English) areas of Canada, for example, people may refer to the "Pont Champlain Bridge" (Bridge Champlain Bridge). Tautologies like these may come into spoken English when written language compresses a bilingual presentation (e.g., from the expected "Pont Champlain / Champlain Bridge" to "Pont Champlain Bridge"), a technique commonly used in Canada, Belgium, New Mexico and other bilingual areas to save space on road signs, grocery packaging, etc., and particularly convenient when one language usually uses adjectives and modifiers before the noun and the other after, as the English/French, Dutch/French and English/Spanish pairs do. Another American Southwest example is the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico (The Inn Hotel), and both Las Cruces, New Mexico and Tucson, Arizona have a Picacho Peak (Peak Peak).

Tautological stock phrases like are especially common in legal English, often pairing an Anglo-Saxon word with a Latin or French synonym, as in "will and testament" and "cease and desist".

Redundant expansion of acronyms

Main article: RAS syndrome

In some cases an acronym, initialization, or abbreviation is commonly used in conjunction with a word which is actually part of the shortened form. One of the better known examples of this is "PIN number", which is often used when explaining the concept. Other common examples include ATM machine, ISBN number, HIV virus, UPC code, VIN number, DVD disk, MIDI interface, RAID array, and RAM memory. This phenomenon is humorously, self-referentially referred to as RAS syndrome (Redundant Acronym Syndrome syndrome).

Intentional repetition of meaning

Intentional repetition of meaning intends to amplify or emphasize a particular thing about what is being discussed: to repeat it because one cares about it. A gift is by definition free of charge, but one might talk about a "free gift" to emphasize that there is no fine print, be it money or an expectation of a return, or that the gift is being given by volition.

This is related to the rhetorical device of hendiadys, where one concept is expressed through the use of two, for example "goblets and gold" meaning wealth, or "this day and age" to mean the present time. Superficially these expressions may seem tautologous, but they are stylistically sound because the repeated meaning is just a stylized way to emphasise the same idea.

Much Old Testament poetry is based on parallelism: the same thing said twice, but in slightly different ways (Fowler puts it as pleonasm).

Deceit is their sole intention, their delight is to mislead

—Psalms 62

Understanding the difference between intention and delight, or deceit and mislead is trivial, unless taken out of context.

But the emphasis on this is changed, because in the first the sole, the individual is emphasised (from Latin: solivagus) but in the second the pleasure is, though more or less the same thing is being said. This can be found very frequently in the Psalms, the Books of the Prophets, and in other areas of the Bible as well. One explanation of this is that when the Bible was translated into Anglo-Saxon, Norman French was still common among the aristocracy, so expressions like "save and except" were translated both for the commoners and the aristocrats; although in this case both "save" and "except" have a French or Latin origin.

Fowler makes a similar case for double negatives; in Old English they intensified the expression, did not negate it back to being a positive, and there are plenty of examples in authors before the eighteenth century, such as Shakespeare. In Modern French, for example, the "ne-pas" formation is essentially a double negative, and in many other Western European latinate languages the same applies, with "ni" or "no", mutatis mutandis, emphasising instead of negating the initial negative. In common French, the "ne" is quite typically dropped, as it was believed to have been in Vulgar Latin.

Examples

• Lord Polonius used a tautology in Act 2, Scene 2 of Hamlet by William Shakespeare when he said the famous lines: "Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief: your noble son is mad: Mad call I it; for, to define true madness, What is't but to be nothing else but mad?"
• The Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution: In New York v. United States, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor stated, "The Tenth Amendment likewise limits the power of Congress, but this limit is not derived from the text of the Tenth Amendment itself, which, as we have discussed, is essentially a tautology." O'Connor reasoned that the Tenth Amendment simply reiterated what was already built into the structure of the Constitution generally: When the States consented to the Constitution they expressly delegated certain powers to the Federal government. Implicitly, what was not given was necessarily retained by the states as the exception that proves the rule.

See also

• English language
• English usage
• Figure of speech
• Fowler's Modern English Usage
• Grammar
• Hyperbole
• Language
• Law of identity
• List of tautological place names
• No true Scotsman
• Oxymoron
• Pleonasm
• Redundancy (language)
• Rhetoric
• Vacuous truth

External links

• Figures of Speech: Tautology
• xkcd: Comic about tautology