Tautology - A Tale Of Two Tales
Tautology; such a lovely word, the sound, the feel of it building deep from within the throat, a delicate sine wave rolling pleasantly across your tongue. Briefly causing it to lick a momentary caress on the roof of your mouth, before flicking sharply at its base and releasing its rotund and pleasant sound upon the world.
Yet its meaning is one of waste, double accountancy, profligacy if you will. A tautologous statement, states the same thing twice, in a different way, and this, they say, is a bad thing.
Her hair was insanely crazy.
BLP - Bad Linguistic Press
However our old and ancient friend tautology is rather viewed in a negative light. If you do a web search for Tautology, English language, you will come across various sites and examples telling you to avoid my beautiful sounding companion.
Apparently it is not, or even, should not be the done thing, according to one such website:
A tautology is an expression or phrase that says the same thing twice, just in a different way. For this reason, a tautology is usually undesirable, as it can make you sound wordier than you need to be, and make you appear foolish. Occasionally, a tautology can help to add emphasis or clarity, or introduce intentional ambiguity, but in most cases it's best to choose just one way to state your meaning and eliminate the extra verbiage.
Pah! I say, poppycock and bunkum! A rabid pox upon you sirs, may all your children have beards, including the girls!!
Verbose The Jealous Ugly Sister
Whereas tautology slips merrily from your tongue in a wonderful, vocabularic, mini-symphony, the uglier twin verbosity, bulldozes its clumsy way around your cheeks and lower pallet, only to stumble past your lips as gracelessly as a new calf taking its first steps.
However tautology is not verbosity, just because I use twenty words where but one will do, does not mean that I am verbose!
Nay! It merely means that I am a fan of our wonderful friend tautology, for it is she that alloweth (my article my made up words), me to spin linguistic threads, evermore searching for that elusive, perfect garment of prose and verse.
The Language Of Love
If I can break character for a moment, just so I can seriously make my point. Shouldn't tautology be celebrated?
An inquiring mind is a healthy one, and looking at things from a different perspective is usually considered a good thing. It helps to gauge the situation and make a more measured decision based on your findings.
My argument is that by exploring different ways of looking at things simultaneously, we are doing something we wouldn't be able to do in real life. Usually it is either/or, with tautology it can be and/and.
Language shapes us in subtle ways, it is intrinsically linked to our past and is a big part of who we are today.
Perhaps I can leave you with a paraphrase from one of the most famous user of tautology in history; William Shakespeare.
Tautology or not tautology that is the question.
Further reading:
Tautology quote - yourdictionary.com: Examples of Tautology
Cryptogee Musings Table Of Contents
The term "tautology" comes to us from logic, so if you have not had any experience in logic it can be very difficult. Logic has to do with the structure of arguments, not the content. So if you said something like "I am tired and hungry" and later said, "That couch is red and soft", those statments would both have the same logical structure: "A and B." In the first instance, 'A' stood for 'I am tired' and B stood for 'I am hungry'; in the second instance, 'A' stood for 'The couch is red' and B stood for 'The couch is soft.' We can break many English sentences into these logical forms.
Tautologies refer to logical forms which can never be false. Let's take the second example: "The couch is red and soft." If the couch were actually blue, then the statement "The couch is red and soft" would be false. So "A and B" is not a tautology - if either 'A' or 'B' is false (whatever they may stand for), then "A and B" is false. But let's look at another example: "The couch is red or not red". In formal logic, this is represented as 'A or not A'. If the couch is red, then "The couch is red or not red" is true. But if the couch is blue, then it's not red, so "The couch is red or not red" is still true. In fact this is true of any statement of the form "A or not A" - If A is true, "A or not A" is true, but if A is false, then not A is true, so "A or not A" is still true. Therefore, there is no way for "A or not A" to be false. Because of this, we call "A or not A" a tautology.
Reminds me of Jimmy Two Times from Goodfellas lol
LOL!!
LOL! New word for me. It is a nice, strong word! A low tone chest word. :) I like! I've always played with words. Some words are pleasant to roll around, others not so much....like placid vs pithy. :)
hi @crytoge. I really miss your contest coming back. 😁
very good post
Great post
it is noticeable that you studied the meaning of tautology well, I did not have knowledge of that word .. and that I studied psychology .. I liked your phrase at the end ..
Tautology or not tautology that is the question.
Your post is very useful, Thanks for your share.
First - tell them what you will tell them
Then - tell them
Last - tell them what you told them.
Tautology, like you said is a way of expressing something by repeating or saying it in a different way or different ways. This can be used for emphasis, to convey something important, or to add beauty to a text. However, many times its use is inadvertent and is just a needless repetition.
A logical statement which is neither a tautology nor a contradiction is a contingency.
A tautology can be verified by constructing a truth tree for its negation: if all of the leaf nodes of such truth tree end in X's, then the original (pre-negated) formula is a tautology.''