Tautology (rhetoric)

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In rhetoric, a tautology is an unnecessary or unessential (and usually unintentional) repetition of meaning, using different and dissimilar words that effectively say the same thing twice (often originally from different languages). It is often regarded or thought of as a fault of style and was defined by Fowler as "saying the same thing twice." It is not 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, clumsy, or lacking in dexterity, 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 usually 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 propositions are guaranteed or that the truth of the propositions cannot be disputed by defining a 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.

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[edit] Examples of tautological expressions

"Free gift" is tautologous because a gift, by definition, is something given without charge. Other such examples of tautology include "sufficiently adequate" and "new innovation"; an "added bonus", or an "unsolved mystery". A common form of tautology is created by using two forms of the same word in the same construction. The British supermarket Tesco sells a brand of lemon thyme which it describes as having an "aromatic aroma"[citation needed].

Tautology is present in sayings such as, "suddenly, without warning", "forward planning" or "planning ahead", and "was first introduced". Another common example is "reason why" or "the reason is because..." which contains repetition because a "reason" is already by definition a description of why something happens. Compare "This is the reason why it happens", "This is the reason it happens" and "This is why it happens".

In some phrases such as "I can see it with my own eyes" or "I made it with my own hands" the tautology is a rhetorical device that adds emphasis, as double negatives used to do. Expressions such as "all in all" or being able to "read and write" (to have literacy) are not strictly tautological but siamese twins.

[edit] Repetitions of meaning in mixed-language phrases

Repetitions of meaning sometimes occur when multiple languages are used together, such as "the La Brea Tar Pits" (the The tar Tar Pits), "monsoon season" (season season), "the hoi polloi" (the the many), "Sierra Nevada mountain range" (Snowy Mountain Range mountain range), "Sahara Desert" (Deserts Desert), "Gobi Desert" (Desert Desert), "shiba inu dog" (little bush dog dog), "Koi carp" (Carp carp), Jirisan Mountain" (Jiri mountain mountain), "Mississippi River" (Great-river river), "Rio Grande river" (big river river), "cheese quesadilla" (cheese cheesy-thing), "salsa sauce" (sauce sauce),"Lake Tahoe" (Lake Lake), "Faroe Islands" (Sheep Island Islands), and "Angkor Wat temple" (Angkor Temple temple). The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (The The Angels Angels of Anaheim). Possibly the most extreme example is "Torpenhow Hill" (Hill-hill-hill Hill, in four languages). "Breedon on the Hill" in Leicestershire is a similar example; its name means "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, New Mexico and other bilingual areas to save space on road signs, grocery packaging, etc, and particularly convenient when one language usually use adjectives and modifiers before the noun and the other after, as the English/French and English/Spanish pairs do.

In New Mexico, the Arroyo del Oso (a ravine running through Albuquerque) is known in English as "Bear Canyon", but sometimes appears as "Arroyo del Oso Canyon" (Small-canyon of-the Bear Canyon) or even "Bear Canyon Arroyo" (Bear Canyon Small-canyon). Also in New Mexico is the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe (the The Inn Hotel). Both Las Cruces, New Mexico and Tucson, Arizona have a Picacho Peak (peak peak).

[edit] Redundant expansion of acronyms

Main article: RAS syndrome

In some cases an acronym 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, and UPC code. This phenomenon is humorously, self-referentially referred to as RAS syndrome (Redundant Acronym Syndrome syndrome).

[edit] Intentional repetition of meaning

A repetition of meaning may be intended to amplify or emphasize a certain aspect of the thing being discussed. For example, a gift is by definition free of charge, but one might talk about a "free gift" to emphasize that there are no hidden obligations, financial or otherwise, or that the gift is being given out of free will. There is also a marketing-psychology aspect of making sure to include the word "free" because it may be the keyword that draws the potential customer's attention although nothing else does.

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 merely a stylized way to express a single concept.

Much Old Testament poetry is based on parallelism: the same thing said twice, but in slightly different ways ('Deceit is their sole intention, their delight is to mislead', Psalm 62). In this example, it is not exactly the same statement in both cases (in the first, the singleness of purpose is highlighted, in the second the pleasure), but more or less the same thing is being affirmed. 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; in this case (perhaps surprisingly) "save" being French and "except" Anglo-Saxon.[1][2]

Fowler[2] 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.

[edit] Examples from popular culture

  • 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?"
  • Some of the notable quotes said by, or attributed to, baseball player and manager Yogi Berra are considered humorous because they are, on the surface, tautological, including "We made too many wrong mistakes" and "You can observe a lot by watching."
  • In a 1988 campaign speech in Ohio, George H. W. Bush said, "It's no exaggeration to say the undecideds could go one way or another."[3]
  • 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.
  • In his book Mostly Harmless, Douglas Adams used the phrase, "Anything that happens, happens. Anything that in happening causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen. Anything that in happening happens again, happens again. Though not necessarily in that order."
  • A story arc of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who was titled "The Deadly Assassin" — one only becomes an assassin by successfully committing murder. Originally, the title was intended to be "The Dangerous Assassin," but the title was changed by the producers as the title just "didn't sound right."
  • Richard B. Frank's history of the end of the Pacific War is titled Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire. By definition, an empire is imperial.
  • The phrase "digital download": given that downloading is the transfer of binary or digital data from a higher level system to a lower one, all downloading is inherently digital.
  • The name of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats is tautological, since tigers are cats, but its name is a merger of two earlier Hamilton teams.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Bryson, Bill (29 Jul 1999), Mother Tongue: The English Language, Penguin Books, ISBN 978-0140143058 
  2. ^ a b Fowler, Henry Watson (1 April 1983), Gowers, Sir Ernest, ed., Modern English Usage (2nd ed.), Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0192813893 
  3. ^ Book Notes, Esther B. Fein, The New York Times, July 1, 1992

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(rhetoric)"
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