Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Tüpflischiesser

I easily get lost in dictionaries. Wikipedia is one of my major traffic consumers. I have no idea how one can visit Wikipedia without using a browser that provides such an essential feature as tabs.

However, yesterday I started on Wikipedia with Modular Arithmetic just to learn at the end that the Concise Oxford Dictionary defines Tautology in a tautological manner:
The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines tautology as "the saying of the same thing twice over in different words". In the spirit of pedantry, it should be noted that this statement is itself tautological; by using the word "same", it is already implied that the thing has a plural value, so there is no need for the word "twice". It could also be argued that the word "over" is redundant in this context. The definition could instead read "the saying of something twice in different words" or "the saying of the same thing in different words".

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It was probably written by an american...they like to say 'twice over', which I never heard used whilst I was living in England (before emmigrating to Switzerland...where Tüpflischiesser are a mighty force!). Have a good one Urs,
regards, David