Talk:Pleonasm

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Contents 1 Archive 2 "The Al-Qaeda base" 3 white snow/green grass 4 Legal Pleonasms 5 Deja vu 6 Tautology 7 Irregardless 8 Over There 9 Tuna Fish 10 Tmesis 11 Off of 12 Outside of 13 Reduplication 14 Proper Nouns 15 Bloody Yogi Berra 16 This is fantastic 17 Rugby 18 Unfocused 19 Not sure if psalm example is valid 20 Is the example using "erotically" spurious? 21 HEADLINE ASSAULTS AREA MAN 22 Shortening Shakespeare 23 Hebrew and Yiddish influences 24 Watchlist please 25 mutatis mutandis example

[edit] Archive

This file was exceeding 45K, so the first half was moved to:

Talk:Pleonasm/archive01

NOTE: This page has not flowed in chronological order, and it was not possible to easily refactor it. So considerable current commentary [as of Oct. 2004] is in that file. Check there if you don't find it here.--NathanHawking 01:36, 2004 Oct 19 (UTC)

As it hit over 60K again, I've moved stagnant discussions to the archive page again. People may wish to note that some of the more heated (to some "interesting", to others "annoying") discussions are now in the archive. Some of them were also quite long. So, basically, if you just discovered this article and are somehow fascinated by its history, the "meat" is in the archive page. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] - 05:26, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "The Al-Qaeda base"

Not disagreeing with you, Stirling Newberry, but I would be interested to know why this one doesn't qualify. It seems to follow the same pattern as the La Ristorante and La Brea examples. — Trilobite (Talk) 00:12, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Because the others have names that imply the the larger grouping. Ristorante (individual item) -> restaurant etc. Aside from that the arabic word for military base would often not be "al Qaeda".

Stirling Newberry 00:49, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)

He means that 'al' is Arabic for 'the', so saying 'the al-Qaeda base' is like saying 'the La Ristorante'. It should then qualify. Daniel (☎) 11:36, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

It probably does qualify, but this is an article with some illustrative examples, not the List of redundant expressions. There are probably hundreds of such examples that could be added, but this is not the place to add them. Also "Al Qaeda" or "Al-Qaeda" is the title of an organization, not simply the words "al" and "qaeda", and Al Qaeda is not properly referred to (in English anyway) as "Qaeda" or "The Qaeda". Compare "Steven King's The Shining" and "The Les Miserables production at the local theatre needs work" — we don't throw out native or foreign definite or indefinite articles when they are parts of titles, even if they conflict with possessives or other articles. This is, basically, why we do say "the La Brea tar pits", and why the Pleonasm article indicates that these are not really pleonastic, just a much more subtle form of redundancy. Personally I think the existing examples are quite sufficient without adding "the Al Qaeda base" just because it is timely and topical. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] - 22:53, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] white snow/green grass

white snow and green grass are some of the canonical examples in my native language. Where are the canonical examples in the article? -- User:MarSch, 08:54, March 5, 2006

Um, read the article, maybe? — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] - 00:26, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

Well, it's not in there. --MarSch 09:30, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

I don't know what you mean. This article is FULL of examples, of every sort of pleonasm (that the article covers to date). If you are saying the article doesn't mention "white snow" and "green grass" specifically, no it doesn't. It's an English article, and these phrases would in English be silly constructed "examples"; not all grass is green, nor is all snow white, in the first place, and English speakers don't actually use either phrase under normal circumstances. I could see these phrases being used when they are NOT pleonastic, such as "Look, I found a patch of green grass!" when speaking of a field of otherwise yellow grass. Or, "I wonder if this is the last patch of white snow in the city", in reference to all the rest of the visible snow being a dirty grey. If I'm not addressing your point here, you'll need to make it more clearly. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] - 22:42, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Legal Pleonasms

I've heard of many legal pleonasms such as 'breaking and entering' or 'to aid and abett'. Apparently these come from the Norman conquest, when those writing were not sure if the french-derived word meant the same as the german-derived word, and so included both. These pleonasms have stuck into modern legal wordings. Daniel (☎) 11:43, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

I believe that to be folk philology. While IANAL, I have worked for most of my professional life with a big pack of lawyers and have absorbed a lot of definitions, history and lore from them. It has been my direct experiece that at least in the vast majority of cases all of these seemingly redundant phrases are actually composed of individual terms of art in legal writing, with very specific (and different) definitions. For example, "breaking" is the opening of a window, door or other barrier (whether or not anything actually does break in the process), while "entering" is trespass upon an enclosed private property (such as a home, shed or warehouse). If you jimmy a lock and then run away, you are still guilty of the crime of breaking, and if you sneak uninvited into a home the door of which was wide open you are guilty of the crime of entering, but not of both breaking and entering. The longer phrase is so common because most often a burglar does both. Similarly "assault and battery" - assault is the attempt (or in some jurisdicitions even the physically acted out threat, like a pulled punch) to hit some, while battery is actually hitting someone. It is possible to battery someone without assaulting them but by through some other means, such as kicking a chair out from under them. And so on. I don't know about "aiding and abetting" in particular, which I think is used only in things like treason cases (not an area I have any experience in!) — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] - 05:23, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

As a side to that, often two words with similar meanings will have different takes on them, with the french-derived meaning being subtler, and the german-derived one 'earthier'. An example is 'obtain' and 'get'.

Are these worthy of inclusion in the article? It would need better examples (mine are pathetic) and sources. Daniel (☎) 11:43, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

It is an interesting topic, but I think it's off-topic for this particular article, other than as it relates to prolixity/logorrhea, and that already seems to be covered pretty well, IMNERHO — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] - 05:23, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Deja vu

I removed the explanation of deja vu because the exact literal meaning of deja vu in French is a bit of trivia that is irrelevant to its status as a pleonasm. Including the information just makes it harder to understand the point the paragraph is trying to make.

Deja vu in the example is not a pleonasm in the same way that The La Brea Tap Pits is. While deja vu literally means 'already seen', it is normally used in French to mean deja vu is the English language sense (the creepy feeling that you've experienced something before). Even if deja vu did not mean 'already seen' in French the phrase 'I'm getting deja vu all over again' would still be a pleonasm.

Maybe if the phrase was 'I've already seen deja vu'... Ashmoo 06:47, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

The edit was fine. I only reverted because there was a bunch of deleted content several edits back. I didn't have a chance to merge in valid subsequent edits. Nohat 08:47, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Tautology

What's the difference between a pleonasm and a linguistic tautology?--Arado 23:04, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

My quickie definitions:

* Redundancy (in the context of rhetoric): the use of unneeded verbiage that is either duplicative, useless, or even worse-than-useless, on any scale.

 * Pleonasm, a subset of redundancy: the use of more verbiage than is necessary to communicate the point

  * Tautology, a subset of pleonasm: saying essentially the same thing twice in different words

  * Logorrhea/prolixity, a subset of pleonasm: using extra verbiage simply to be longwinded or for obfuscatory purposes

  * Oxymoron, a subset or outgrowth or side effect of pleonasm: self-contradiction through the use of unneeded verbiage

 * Repetition (in the broad sense, of substantial passages/expositions, not just words), a subset of redundancy: Repeating oneself in excess (whether in the same or different terms), to hammer home a point, get attention, or various other reasons. An extreme example (which is also a logic fallacy) would be recycling an entire argument without substantial change in response to an argument one is unable to defend against in hopes that the re-presentation of the stale argument will be mistaken for an actual defense. This is very, very common in politics, but isn't pleonasm; it's something much broader. By "repetition" here (there may be a more precise rhetorical term for what I'm talking about), I mean a little kid asking 5 times in 5 minutes, "Are we there yet?!" to get attention and express frustration, or Martin Luther King Jr. laying it on thick with, "Free at last! Free at last!". This isn't pleonasm, it's simply rhetorical repetition. The redundant Bible quotes in the pleonasm article probably don't really belong there. The Bible likes to repeat itself a lot, so I'm sure there are great pleonasm examples in it that aren't the wholesale repetition of sentences for rhetorical effect like the extant examples are.

I don't know how well accepted these definitions would be - some might say that oxymora are not a form of redundancy and ergo not really related to pleonasm.

— SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] - 04:53, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

The statement in the first paragraph is misleading. My only knowledge of these terms come from our articles, but it is immediately apparent that a semantic pleonasm could be equivalent to a rhetorical tautology, but to say that a pleonasm is equivalent to a tautology is definitely incorrect. --[anon.]

Yeah, it was a problem. I think I've addressed it adequately. Someone slapped in something like "And another term for this is tautology (rhetoric)", which led to this problem. Another aspect of the problem is that the rhetorical tautology article is poorly written and is actually mostly talking about pleonasm. I may try to work on them both in tandem or something. I also just overhauled the redundancy (language) page which was just a rather useless stub that mostly talked about pleonasm and RAS syndrome, to the extent that it really talked about anything. I think it now summarizes all of these sometimes overlapping terms a bit better. I think this whole family of articles could benefit from directly quoting definitions and differentiation from some rhetoric textbooks, but I don't happen to have one handy. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] - 04:53, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Irregardless

Can we please add something to the little note on irregardless about the word 'irrespective'? I always think of irrespective when I see or hear irregardless (as well as thinking of regardless). I do believe that irregardless is a confusion of the two terms more than simply an over-negation of 'with regard to.' Or at least mention that 'irrespective' is the correct use of "ir-" and the words are similiar in meaning. RoseWill 10:54, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

Done. Frankly, I thought I'd already done that. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] - 04:23, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Over There

"put that glass over there on the table" would not necessarily have only one meaning if there were only one table in the room. If it were a long table, it could mean "at that end of the table, not this end." A better example would be more appropriate.

Also, if someone were pointing to specific part of the table. Although I did not think of any such thing when I was reading that section.RoseWill 09:43, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

It was just an example, and I think the fact that there's a clear exception already being explained gets the point across. It wasn't meant to be a comprehensive analysis of every possible interpretation. :-) If someone can think of a better example, cool. But the point of the example was "this is generally pleonastic, but look in some contexts it might not be." Mission accomplished. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] - 04:26, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Tuna Fish

"Tuna fish" is also used in the UK.--Greg K Nicholson 02:28:57, 2005-08-09 (UTC)

I'm not sure that tuna fish is a good example. The author interprets it as "Tuna, (which is [redundantly] a fish)". However, it appears to me to be adjectival: "Fish ([not-redundantly] of the Tuna variety")". Considering further, on the one hand, to say "a salmon fish sandwich" is absurd, but on the other, [at least in the UK], it is usually not referred to as "A tuna sandwich". I think that the author is technically correct, but that an anomaly of UK spoken English renders the example less effective. --81.187.40.226

The apparent Brit writing just before you said that the British also use the phrase "tuna fish", so I think your unfamiliarity with it is perhaps even more dialectal than US vs. UK English. I'm hard pressed to come up with a better example - "tuna fish" really IS very common in at least North American English, and serves as a good example, in the passage it is in (the point of which was that although "tuna fish" is *technically* not pleonastic in general usage, because at least some of us might be eating both tuna fish and tuna fruit as suited our whim, to most English speakers the phrase effectiveley is pleonastic, because we don't eat many prickly pears.) As an aside, if you said "I caught a tuna fish while sailing in the Atlantic" the usage would absolutely be pleonastic, since cacti don't grow in the ocean. :-) As for the adjectival issue, I think that's a stretch in this case. In a case where someone had, say, used the scientific name, or the common name of the fish was not actually commonly known at all, I could perhaps see your point. The article really already covers this though, just not with such a constructed example. I explains clearly that a phrase can be considered pleonastic or nonpleonastic depending on a variety of conditions, one of the main ones being prior information. I might have to say "I just ate a really good loach fish" to a someone from the Gobi desert, but I won't have to say that to a fisherman or an aquarist; and see the "ocean cactus" issue above - if I were speaking to someone who knew nothing at all about the sea and what lives in it, such as very small child, "tuna fish" might not be pleonastic in the context. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] - 04:22, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

Re: The construction "tuna fish" does have a disambiguating merit in that users of the phrase are often referring specifically to the tuna that comes in cans and is used as lunchmeat or in tuna salad. This differs from "tuna" which normally refers to the non-processed form of the fish, such as in "tuna steaks" or "tuna filets.":

I keep reverting this edit because it is unsourced and just a non-encyclopedic opinion until it can be sourced (that it is an opinion and not an undeniable fact is clear, since I happen to disagree and have a widely differing opinion; QED). It isn't enough that point #3 in that section, about disambiguation, might apply. I could also say "we say 'tuna fish' because it differentiates 'tuna fish caught by oneself with a hook' from 'tuna bought at market, fresh or canned'; aside from the fact that this hypothetical assertion would contradict the previous assertion, in the absence of evidence to support such an assertion, it is non-encyclopedic opinion a.k.a. "original research". PS: That point aside, I have to frankly just disagree with the assertion in the first place. Even in American English which the article alleges (incorrectly, according to some UK respondents here and at Talk:List of redundant expressions) is exclusively where one finds the "tuna fish" construction, I (a native American English speaker, who has lived in most major regions of the country, with the exception of the central North) have never seen any evidence of the distinction the above re-reverted edit is trying to draw. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 21:45, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

A pun from the unix world: "You can tune a file system, but you can’t tune a fish." (See e.g. http://www.gsp.com/cgi-bin/man.cgi?section=8&topic=tunefs.) 70.111.91.127 (talk) 05:15, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Tmesis

Our example of a tmesis says "I abso-damned-lutely agree!". Is it just me, or does that sound really unnatural? I can see "abso-fucking-lutely", I can see "abso-bloody-lutely" and probably some others, but 'damned' just doesn't sound right there to me. We probably don't want to change it to 'fucking' as it could be gratuitously offensive, and 'bloody' might be too geospecific. Any thoughts? Skittle 15:17, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, but I actually say "abso-damned-lutely". so, to me it seems normal. :-) Anecdotal as that may be... — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 07:49, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Off of

"Off of" being primarily American, could we find another example? Stevage 02:33, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Outside of

It seems very strange to me that the author of this othwerwise very erudite article uses the expression outside of - in my experience one of the most common pleonasms (with its sister inside of). --Colin Bottoms 15:28, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Just fix it. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 02:07, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Reduplication

Removed this:

The very word "reduplication" is an example of such an exception; the self-referential and clearly redundant format of this linguistic neologism was intentional (as surely was the mild humor it invokes.)"

This appears to be pure speculation, and a glance at a good dictionary on the author's part would have sufficed to disprove it. Reduplication is not a "linguistic neologism", humorous or otherwise. It was borrowed directly from Latin with the current meaning centuries ago.

Bassington 05:52, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Partially reverted. If a paragraph has problems, fix the problems, don't delete the paragraph. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 06:18, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

I should have included in my original comment: the author is also mistaken about this being a redundancy, as this re has the sense of back, rather than again. Let me know if specific citations are needed here; the OED or any English etymological dictionary will suffice. Apologies for not providing the full justification in the initial comment; however, I am again deleting the incorrect material.

Bassington 06:44, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Further comment: saying that this re- is used in the "back" sense here may be an oversimplification; there is a large set of words of similar origin in which re- does not have an unambiguous sense of "back", but definitely does not have the sense of "again". The important points here, though, are:

1. The claim that this is an intentional redundancy is pure speculation, unless the author has some information about the creation of this word in Latin that would substantiate it. If so, that information should be sourced.

2. The claim that this is a redundancy at all is very dubious.

Sorry not to have said all this right at the outset!

Bassington 07:11, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Proper Nouns

"We went to the 'Il Ristorante' restaurant."

"The La Brea tar pits are fascinating."

Surely "La Brea" in this context is a proper noun referring to a place. So its not redundant. Pedantic, yes, but so is much of this article! - Anon

It is a proper noun, but the point of the section is that such multi-lingual constructions can internally rendundant: "We hired a mariachi band for the wedding" ⇒ "We hired mariachis for the wedding". The further one gets from understanding of the original meaning and usage of the name or loan word/phrase, the more likely the construction is to become pleonastic. That doesn't make it truly redundant in an actual usage sense, but can lead to quite a lot of underlying tautology, as in Torpenhow Hill. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 19:05, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Bloody Yogi Berra

Two things. Firstly, no-one else has heard of Yogi Berra unless they have a particular interested in historic Baseball catchers. This article needs a more generic quotee than he. I appreciate the enormous US leanings of Wiki, but English is spoken by others besides you and any linguistical articles need to have a more worldly viewpoint.

Secondly the quote alluded to within the "Subtle redundancies" section cannot be an ironic play on words. Irony being a meaning unintended by the author and a play on words being a deliberate attempt at deriving humour (sorry, humor [sic]) by twisting expected grammatical structures. VonBlade 22:23, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Actually Berra is a lot more famous these days for Yogiisms than for baseball (except among baseball history afficionados, of course). The point that more quotes would help is a good one though. As for irony, there are more than one kind of irony. I do think we certainly want to avoid the "Alanis Morrisette error" of mistaking inconvenient coincidence for irony, and the even more common one of mistaking sarcasm for irony. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 19:05, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] This is fantastic

I just read this article and I have to congratulate however wrote this line of pure poetry:

Although such usage may be favored in certain contexts, it may also be disfavored when used gratuitously to portray false erudition, obfuscate, or otherwise introduce unnecessary verbiage.

I'm assuming that we are all for eschewing circumlocution in order for meaning and context be self-apparent? :D Seriously, this could only be improved if it was written in trochaic hexameter. --Oskar 13:31, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

I, myself, have inferrentially absorbed the concept that another editor, namely the Oskar Sigvardsson to whom I am responding, raises concerns that the content of the article to which this discussion and debate forum pertains could potentially be advertising the necessity of its receiving some judicious editorial attention.  ;-) Have at it! It does need some work, that's for sure. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 19:05, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

No, I meant it, I think the sentence is stellar! It's a delightful little bit of encyclopedic irony, I want it to stay! --Oskar 07:58, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

I know I'm late to this but it absolutely should stay. It's glorious. VonBlade 22:45, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

Orwell would kill you. >;-) — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 00:33, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Rugby

Not actually sure where I stand on this as I noticed it myself and it's been kind of bugging me:

Do all Rugby clubs in the city of Rugby (such as Rugby Lions RFC and Rugby Welsh RFC, see here http://services.hopewiser.com/cgi-bin/rfu_prox.cgi and type in CV21 2JS) count as Pleonasms seeing as Rugby Football is specifically that type of football developed in Rugby or is it the case that Rugby is used slightly differently in each case, being a noun and then an adjective in the cases mentioned? Does the extra 'Rugby' serve only to distinguish these clubs from Rugby's (Association) Football club and is it thus a Rhetorical Tautology?

Discuss (or Dismiss)

It's neither. Rugby as a word (despite is geonymous origin) is a distinct entity from Rugby as a placename. That it isn't truly redundant is clear a) by tokenizing them ("the A Lions B Football Club" - A and B are not equatable), and b) by recognizing that it's simply a coincidence - there are (according to Rugby) five other places named Rugby; the British place Rugby in question just happened to be where rugby was invented. Point "a" is reinforced when you consider that many things that derive from a place name actually shift in spelling (i.e. it's just further coincidence that the game isn't spelled rugbie). — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 00:31, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Unfocused

I'm not trying to be a jerk here, but this article is unfocused, and it looks like it's got a lot of original research. I am also a grammar fan, but I don't think Wikipedia is the right place to write an extended essay on pleonasm. Please, let's try to either trim this article or find some sources for most of it. Motorneuron 15:08, 22 September 2007 (UTC)motorneuron

Get started sourcing. :-) — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 03:23, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Not sure if psalm example is valid

An example is cited, "O LORD, how many are my foes! Many are rising against me" - this seems at worst a case of simple repetition, rather than a pleonastic phrase on the order of "trapezoid-shaped". I'd interpret it to be entirely informative - just because you have many enemies doesn't mean they're all rising against you right now, and if they are then I suppose it's a good time to pray! The same text says there are many other examples, but if this was the best the editor had to offer... 70.15.116.59 (talk) 06:25, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

I don't think the article says that the redundancy must be 100% for it to be considered pleonastic. So this would still be a pleonasm, since it could be rewritten so say "O LORD, many foes are rising against me", with no loss of meaning, but considerable loss of poetic value. (Remember that the article says that pleonasm is often a literary virtue). As the article also says, Psalms has many other examples, so if you don't like this one, just replace it. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 23:45, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Are you sure about this? "O LORD, how many are my foes! Many are rising against me" -- the 'many' are not 'many foes' but rather 'many persons' who by rising against him become his foes. 68.101.213.100 (talk) 18:42, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Is the example using "erotically" spurious?

The article says, '"erotically" doesn't look "right" to many Americans', but unlike "eroticly" it does look right to Merriam-Webster (at least on http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/erotically). 70.111.91.127 (talk) 05:21, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

That doesn't seem to be the point of the passage; it wasn't about what is correct according to dictionaries, but about perceptions in American English. I've rewritten it to address the issue, and several other problems, and based the rewrite on OED research. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 00:23, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] HEADLINE ASSAULTS AREA MAN

Halfway through the "Subtler redundancies" section, the following exmaples appear:

• "The sound of the loud music drowned out the sound of the burglary."
• "The loud music drowned out the sound of the burglary."
• "The music drowned out the burglary."

Then this paragraph follows:

• The reader or hearer does not have to be told that loud music has a sound, and in a newspaper headline or other abbreviated prose can even be counted upon to infer that "the burglary" is a proxy for "the sound of the burglary" and that the music necessarily must have been loud to drown it out. Many are critical of the excessively abbreviated constructions of "headline-itis" or "newsspeak", so "loud [music]" and "sound of the [burglary]" in the above example should probably not be properly regarded as pleonastic or otherwise genuinely redundant, but simply as informative and clarifying.

Actually, a proper headline would be: "MUSIC DROWNS OUT BURGLARY". In headline style, "a" and "the" are usually dropped, and present tense is preferred. A tabloid headline would read: "MUSIC DROWNS [your city] BURGLAR!" In tabloid headlines, meaning may be deliberately confused, to increase sales, by inducing cognitive dissonance in passers-by. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Morenus (talk • contribs) 17:02, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

At first I wasn't sure what your point was, since the article nowhere specified what a headline actually would or would not have said. But I think that my changing 'infer that "the burglary" is a proxy for "the sound of the burglary"' to 'infer that "burglary" is a proxy for "sound of the burglary"' fixes it. The verb tense issue doesn't seem germane. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 23:38, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Shortening Shakespeare

The "Other forms" section ends thusly:

• "...[T]he only thing we have to fear is fear itself."—Franklin D. Roosevelt, "First Inaugural Address", March 1933.
• "With eager feeding[,] food doth choke the feeder."—William Shakespeare, Richard II (play), II, i, 37.
• As with cognate objects, these constructions are not redundant because the repeated words or derivatives cannot be removed without removing meaning or even destroying the sentence, though in most cases they could be replaced with non-related synonyms at the cost of style (e.g., compare "The only thing we have to fear is terror".)

With good reason, Shakespeare's English is rarely considered faulty. The sentence is fine wordplay, and belongs in its context. It is, in fact, a line of blank verse. On its own, however, it could be shortened or altered, without removing meaning or destroying the sentence. To wit:

• "Eager feeding will choke the feeder." (Food is implied)
• "The glutton with his food soon chokes himself." (Complete rewrite but essentially equivalent) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Morenus (talk • contribs) 18:07, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Hebrew and Yiddish influences

There's no evidence that Hebrew has influenced the infixation of fucking etc. (and the process doesn't exist in Yiddish). Note that Lighter's Hist. Dict. of Am. Slang attests infixation of bloody in Brit. Eng. from 1895, and records an analogous use of jolly from at least the 1870's. There's also no Hebrew model for reduplications like topless-shmopless, and in any case, Hebrew has had virtually no direct influence on colloquial spoken English. This is a pure yiddishism.

You misunderstood the (original) passage; it said that -shm reduplication was from Yiddish, and infixing from Hebrew, not the other way around and not both. I don't mind the Hebrew assertion being deleted, since (aside from the fact that I think Arabic is more likely) it wasn't sourced, and some linguists would agree while others would not, so unless and until multiple sources are compared and contrasted and some theory of the origin of infixing in English is sourceable as at least generally accepted, it shouldn't be in the article. Such infixing is certainly not a native feature of English; nor of other Germanic languages, nor of Romance languages like French and Latin, nor of Greek, the three main sources of what has become English, so it had to come from somewhere - morphological (word-structure) changes at a level that basic simply do not magically appear in a language all of a sudden. Hebrew or more likely (see below) Arabic are certainly the most likely sources, being the only major languages in proximity to Europe to use infixing as a basic word-building feature. The Hebrew theory is reasonable, due to the large influx of Jews into Europe during the middle ages, before Yiddish even developed. I think a stronger theory is that it comes from Arabic, and entered English via sailors and merchants whose usual route was Britain to the Middle East and back again, in precisely the same way that most of the Italian and Portuguese and (before American westward expansion into Spanish/Mexican territory) Spanish words that have been borrowed into English were borrowed. Trade is the number one vector for loan words, by a wide margin. (However, proponents of the Hebrew theory would point out that Jews have been heavily involved in commerce in Europe since their arrival.) — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 23:27, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Watchlist please

This article was severely joke-vandalized, by its lead section (second para. if I recall) being tripled in size by someone adding around 4 or 5 pleonastic restatements of the main point of the paragraph, and no one noticed for quite some time. I do watchlist this article, but I do not edit every day, and the article would benefit from additional watchers. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 23:10, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] mutatis mutandis example

Despite dire warnings not to proliferate examples, I added "mutatis mutandis" as a cognate object example, the point being to show that the construction is old, and is not specific to English. (Arguably this should be under Polyptoton). Geoffrey.landis (talk) 01:59, 16 April 2008 (UTC)