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Pleonasm can serve as a redundancy check; if a word is unknown, misunderstood, misheard, or if the medium of communication is poor—a static-filled radio transmission or sloppy handwriting—pleonastic phrases can help ensure that the meaning is communicated even if some of the words are lost. [citation needed]
In phonology, a minimal pair is a pair of words or phrases that differs by only one phoneme, the smallest distinctive unit of the sound system. Even so, phonemes may differ on several phonetic features. For example, the English phonemes /p/ and /b/ in the words pin and bin feature different voicing, aspiration, and muscular tension.
RAS syndrome, where RAS stands for redundant acronym syndrome (making the phrase "RAS syndrome" autological), is the redundant use of one or more of the words that make up an acronym in conjunction with the abbreviated form. This means, in effect, repeating one or more words from the acronym.
Every day (two words) is an adverb phrase meaning "daily" or "every weekday". Everyday (one word) is an adjective meaning "ordinary". [48] exacerbate and exasperate. Exacerbate means "to make worse". Exasperate means "to annoy". Standard: Treatment by untrained personnel can exacerbate injuries.
hoi polloi – The question surrounding hoi polloi is whether it is appropriate to use the article the preceding the phrase; it arises because οἱ (hoi) is the Greek word for "the" in the phrase and classical purists complain that adding the makes the phrase redundant: "the the common people". Foreign phrases borrowed into English are often ...
Palilalia is defined as the repetition of the speaker's words or phrases, often for a varying number of repeats. Repeated units are generally whole sections of words and are larger than a syllable, with words being repeated the most often, followed by phrases, and then syllables or sounds.
In literary criticism and rhetoric, a tautology is a statement that repeats an idea using near-synonymous morphemes, words or phrases, effectively "saying the same thing twice". [1] [2] Tautology and pleonasm are not consistently differentiated in literature. [3] Like pleonasm, tautology is often considered a fault of style when unintentional.
The order of the words cannot be reversed, as it would be seen as particularly unusual to ask someone to desist and cease or to have property owned clear and free, when these common legal phrases are universally known as cease and desist and free and clear.