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Five (unsuspected) pleonasms that must be avoided at all costs

2023-02-23T06:14:25.951Z


Redundant formulas are legion in everyday language. How to get rid of it?


"Going outside", "collaborating together", "false pretext"... Redundancy tends to slip into the least of our daily expressions.

Borrowed from the grammatical Low Latin “pleonasmus” (“overabundance, excess”), “pleonasm” designates a term that adds repetition to what has already been stated.

To discover

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To the great displeasure of lovers of the French language, our hearing has become accustomed to this disease, the use of which, as Alain Rey points out in the Dictionnaire historique

de la langue française

(Le Robert), sometimes testifies to a negative judgment and an ironic appreciation.

Most of the time, however, the pleonasm arises without our knowledge and deprives our words of their credibility.

It is then advisable to notice the erroneous formulas of the common usage to better oust them.

A tennis court

How about strapping on the cleats before battling it out with the opposing team “on the football soccer field”?

The repetition is absurd, you will agree.

Imagine that it is just as important when we talk about "tennis court".

Because, as can be read in the

Trésor de la langue française

, the “court” is a rectangular clay or hard court specially designed for tennis.

Don't worry, the great authors themselves made the mistake.

In 1939, in

Lépreuses

, Montherlant spoke of a

“reddish tennis court”

.

A good student, however, Aragon wrote three years earlier, in

Les Beaux Quartiers

:

“The vacant lot has been cut in three to make three tennis courts, people in white are running there, the balls are flying, the rackets are beating the air.

It was the back court.”

another option

Appeared in the 15th century as a term of ecclesiastical law, the “alternative” (from the Latin “alternare”, “to alternate”) designates what presents a choice between two possibilities, one of which excludes the other, specifies the French Academy. .

In other words, the alternative is always other.

So don't say,

"Going to lunch at the restaurant on rue Guynemer is another alternative."

But:

"Going to lunch at the restaurant on rue Guynemer is an alternative."

Lay an egg

Accuracy probably occurred since it is said pejoratively of an artistic or intellectual work produced following many others, that it was "laid" by its author, to say that a hen has "laid an egg" is a notable redundancy.

Derived from the Latin "ponere", "to lay, to deposit", the transitive verb "to lay" purely qualifies the action of an oviparous animal which lays its eggs.

What else to lay?

Read alsoThese grammatical inconsistencies that must be avoided at all costs

A gust of wind

Just as laying is only related to the egg, the gust is used exclusively to speak of the wind.

Derived from the Italian "raffica", itself influenced by the French "s'affaler" ("to be pushed by the wind towards a coast - speaking of a boat -"), the word has been used since the 17th century for designate a sudden, violent and short gust of wind.

In Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem (1811), Chateaubriand writes:

“A sudden gust from the south drove us towards the island of Rhodes.”

It should be noted that the pleonasm "gust of wind" is excusable however, insofar as the military slang seized the term to speak of a "burst of artillery", term at the origin of the name of a famous French combat aircraft as well.

A sand dune

Borrowed from the Middle Dutch "dune", a word of Celtic origin, a "dune" qualifies by definition a hill of sand formed by the wind along certain coasts or in a desert region.

As the

Treasury of the French language

specifies , the word arrived in France in the 12th century, to designate the “coastal dunes” of Dunkirk, Calais, Landes.

We also talk about the dunes of the Grand Erg Oriental and those which, under the Second Empire, were fixed in the South-West of France by plantations of maritime pines.

Dunes only made of sand…

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2023-02-23

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