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Redundancy, and "useless" or "nonsensical" words (or phrases, or morphemes), can also be inherited by one language from the influence of another and are not pleonasms in the more critical sense but actual changes in grammatical construction considered to be required for "proper" usage in the language or dialect in question.
See List of English words with disputed usage for words that are used in ways that are deprecated by some usage writers but are condoned by some dictionaries. There may be regional variations in grammar, orthography, and word-use, especially between different English-speaking countries.
A aggravate – Some have argued that this word should not be used in the sense of "to annoy" or "to oppress", but only to mean "to make worse". According to AHDI, the use of "aggravate" as "annoy" occurs in English as far back as the 17th century. In Latin, from which the word was borrowed, both meanings were used. Sixty-eight percent of AHD4's usage panel approves of its use in "It's the ...
The term was seen in English in the early 16th century. [4] It is generally thought to be an onomatopoeia imitative of speech, similar to the words jabber (to talk rapidly) and gibber (to speak inarticulately). [5] [6] It may originate from the word jib, which is the Angloromani variant of the Romani language word meaning
The company published a list of the most mispronounced words of the year in the United States and the United Kingdom on Wednesday, including foreign words that have entered the English lexicon for ...
The English language, along with other European ones, adopted the word and used it as similar meaning, slow and delayed. In English, the word "to decelerate " would become a more common term than "to retard", while in others like French [ 9 ] or Catalan, [ 10 ] retard is still in common usage to mean 'delay' ( tard ).
A disfluence or nonfluence is a non-pathological hesitance when speaking, the use of fillers (“like” or “uh”), or the repetition of a word or phrase. This needs to be distinguished from a fluency disorder like stuttering with an interruption of fluency of speech, accompanied by "excessive tension, speaking avoidance, struggle behaviors, and secondary mannerism".
An idiom is a common word or phrase with a figurative, non-literal meaning that is understood culturally and differs from what its composite words' denotations would suggest; i.e. the words together have a meaning that is different from the dictionary definitions of the individual words (although some idioms do retain their literal meanings – see the example "kick the bucket" below).