| I would think that since expletive means a "noise word" of any sort, not merely
an obscene one, that the use is legal. However, it appears that this person
is either pompous, or wiser than we suspect.
Jon
|
| "Expletive" means "filling out", from "ex-", out, and "plere", to fill. If
he meant to acknowledge that his string of adjectives served only the
purpose of killing time until the next commercial, without providing any
substantive information, "expletive" was right on the money.
-John
|
| Re .2
>I would think that since expletive means a "noise word" of any sort, not merely
----
>an obscene one, that the use is legal. However, it appears that this person
----
>is either pompous, or wiser than we suspect.
"That ... that" -- anyone else notice this example of "Dept. of
Redundancy Dept."? It seems to be quite common,
and I've never heard anyone complain. Strange.
Gabriel.
|
| .5> > I would think that since expletive means a "noise word" of any sort, not
.5> ----
.5> > merely an obscene one, that the use is legal.
.5> ----
.5> [...] this example of "Dept. of Redundancy Dept." [...] seems to be quite
.5> common, and I've never heard anyone complain. Strange.
Maybe it's not too strange. We may be tempted to think: the farther from the
original use [of `that', in this case] the more likely is the poor pea brain of
the writer to forget that he used it and to overreach his grammatic grasp. But
this is also true: the farther from the original use, the more of a courtesy it
might be to remind the reader of the guideword within whose scope he is. This
kind of urge is probably what ends some languages up with double negatives and
like constructs, which rigorous logic tempts us to reject -- as though
redundancy were so bad that less of it was always better.
Sometimes, redundancy is helpful error-protection, as language writers learn.
Since we repeat phrases (admittedly, in different guises, whereas few different
guises are available for a word like `that'), we may find ourselves repeating
parts of speech too... and getting away with it, if it's inconspicuous.
The more the separation (the greater the urge to be helpful), the less
conspicuous and so by definition the less offensive.
Native writers in Munich, I guess, cover themselves; at least when it comes to
separable verbs. They leave the 1st mention, probably on the assumption that
the reader will be offended by any redundancy, until they get to the end of
the sentence (or chapter, if that's where it will be most useful to the reader)
off.
|