Concision at War with Redundancy – Maverick Philosopher

One of my faults as a writer is that I am prolix. I almost wrote ‘excessively prolix,’ which would have illustrated the fault in question. Piling ‘excessively’ onto ‘prolix’ would not only have been unnecessary, but would also have suggested that one can be prolix in moderation. But wordiness is a vice, and vices should be extirpated, not moderated.

Some years back, The Wall Street Journal described itself as “the daily diary of the American dream.” A delightful pleonasm: ‘diary’ derives from the Latin dies, day. A daily diary is like one of Al Franken’s lying liars. I learned recently that ‘journal’ also derives from Latin dies even though they have no letters in common. A fact like that excites a guy like me. Dies gave rise to diurnus, which became the Italian giornale and the French journal, passing into English as ‘journal’ circa 1590. (Vide Robert Hendrickson, QPB Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, 2nd ed., 2004, p. 400) By the way, this is a fascinating book, and I recommend it.

Here are some other examples of redundant expressions, culled from Joseph M. Williams, Style: Toward Grace and Clarity (Chicago, 1990, p. 116): past memories, basic fundamentals, true facts, important essentials, future plans, personal beliefs, consensus of opinion, sudden crisis, terrible tragedy, end result, final outcome, initial preparation, free gift. No doubt some of these are disputable. Suppose you set aside six months to prepare for a marathon. You begin by running 30 miles per week, gradually working up to 45 mile weeks. It would make sense to say that your initial preparation was less demanding than the later phases of your preparation. There is no redundancy here.

And what about future plans? ‘Plan’ is ambiguous as between the act of planning and its object. No doubt the object of planning is always later than the act of planning, just as the object of remembering is always earlier than the act of remembering. Hence ‘future plan’ is redundant when used to refer to the object of planning. But it is not redundant when used to refer to the act of planning. An act of planning can lie in the future, in the present, or in the past. If every use of ‘future plan’ were redundant, then every use of ‘past plan’ and ‘present plan’ would be oxymoronic. But it is no oxymoron to say, ‘My past plans all went unrealized,’ or ‘My present plan is to sell the vacation house.’

By similar reasoning, one should be able to convince oneself that past memories has non-redundant uses. An old man might complain, ‘My present memories are not as vivid as my past memories.’ This is not redundant because an act of remembering can lie in the past.

One conclusion to be drawn is that good writing is not a mechanical affair: it cannot be reduced to rules and regulations, algorithms and checklists. Did you catch ‘rules and regulations’? That is a redundancy and I used it purposely to test you. ‘Regulation’ is from the Latin regula, meaning rule. There is also the connection to rex, regis, king, ruler. And so on and so forth.