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My name is David Burrows and I am a freelance translator of Spanish into English. This blog contains some of my favourite words, a (mostly) amusing explanation of said words as well as some of my musings about translation. I hope you enjoy it.

Friday 29 October 2010

Tautology

Noun - the saying of the same thing twice over in different way, generally considered to be a fault of style.
  • A phrase or expression in which the same thing is said twice in different words.
  • A statement that is true by necessity or by virtue of its logical form.
Origin - Via late Latin from Greek, from tautologos: repeating what has been said, from tauto:same and logos: word.
This picture says a thousand words, that's right 1000.

The thing about tautology is that it is not only very good but it is also great. To give an example of how amusing and funny it is, let's look at the following examples that follow: "I'll kill you to death!" - Superman (Quite hard to kill someone with any other result, isn't it?); "Beliefs we can believe in." - Barack Obama (Not much of a belief if you don't believe it); "Free gifts." - Some evil marketing guy (Show me a gift that isn't free.) and "The Lone Rangers" - A band from the film Airheads (How can you pluralise Lone Ranger?).
It also has a copious plethora of derivatives: tautological, tautologically, tautologist, tautologise and tautologous.
But anyway, all this repeating myself is getting repetitive. Especially because I keep saying the same thing more than once.


1 comment:

  1. "I kill you to death" might have been a bit much but its pretty funny when you say it out loud

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