Some very unique redundancies
Long ago, a teacher circled the expression “very unique” in an essay I wrote in some lower grade or other. “REDUNDANT,” her marginal note said. If I had had the presence of mind to look up “unique” in the dictionary, I might have responded that it is sometimes defined as “unusual” and I might have pointed to its use by J. D. Salinger (“we were fairly unique, the sixty of us, …”).
I was too shocked by the red marks on my essay to do any of that. And I avoid “very unique” to this day and wrinkle my nose at any offers of a “complimentary gift.”
I still wonder about redundancy though. Recently I heard someone use the expression “kill them dead” (he was referring to weeds in his yard, thankfully). Had my teacher been around, she might have commented.
But “kill them dead” is a pretty common expression, and it seems to me that it is emphatic. It shades the meaning of “kill,” with all its metaphoric uses, in the direction of literalness and finality. If you kill the weeds dead, you are eradicating them.
And it’s not uncommon for repetition to be used emphatically as well: the common intensive “very, very” is very easy to spot as are clonings like “coffee coffee” (rather than decaf) or the ne plus ultra “writer’s writer.”
Some redundancies still jump out at us. If you write that someone “ascended up the staircase,” the preposition will sound like nails on a chalkboard and should be cut. But what about “The detective wrote down our names in his notebook.” There’s a whiff of redundancy: either “The detective wrote our names in his notebook” or “The detective wrote down our names” would do. But “write” does not imply “down” to the same degree that “ascend” implies “up,” so it is less likely to raise editorial hackles.
Other redundancies paint a picture or slow the pace of prose. If you shrug, it’s always with your shoulders, so saying “She shrugged her shoulders” is redundant. But sometimes just writing “She shrugged” is too little. Adding the shoulders can make for a more meaningful shrug. The same goes for “squint” versus “squint your eyes” or “kneel” versus “kneel down.” These are judgement calls.
And sometimes an overt redundancy demands that we interpret a sentence creatively. You may recall astronaut Neil Armstrong’s first words on the moon. In a slip of the tongue, he produced the redundant “That’s one small step for man—one giant leap for mankind.” But his earth-bound hearers interpreted the redundancy figuratively enough to imbue it with historic meaning.
Or consider George Orwell’s slogan from Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” If you try to read that porcine proclamation literally, you run into trouble. Instead we interpret “more equal” as a comment on hypocrisy. “More equal” is a bit like “very unique,” only more so.
I guess one way to look at all this is that some redundancies are more redundant than others.
Featured image by Scott Graham via Unsplash