Old ancient ancestors

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The old rhetorical sense of tautology (taw-TAHL-uh-gee, from Greek tauto = the same + logia = saying, word) differs significantly from the modern logical meaning. Today tautology is usually understood as a statement that is always true because it cannot logically be false. Saying that "The earth is either spherical or flat" will strike most people as valid only because it encompasses both of the mutually contradictory available hypotheses. The common human response to tautologies of this sort is, "Well, duh!"

Although the understanding of tautology as an unfalsifiable statement is the dominant one today, all good English dictionaries still list among the word's meanings (usually, indeed, as the primary meaning) something like this definition in the American Heritage Dictionary: "Needless repetition of the same sense in different words; redundancy." Saying "the ATM machine" is tautological because the ATM is a machine, and entering "a PIN number" into it is absurd because the PIN is a number. This sense of the word goes back to ancient Greece. The Latin rhetoricians treated tautology as a stylistic vice, in contrast to many good sorts of repetition. Henry Peacham wrote in The Garden of Eloquence that "Tautologia is a tedious and wearisome repetition of one word."

Lenehan's "old ancient ancestors" is certainly wearisome. Simply saying "ancestors" would suffice; making them "ancient" and then describing these ancients as "old" adds two layers of tediousness. Later in the chapter he indulges the same impulse slightly more wittily while aping overblown parliamentary language: "That it be and hereby is resolutely resolved." To resolve something means to make a resolution, just as having resolve means being resolute, and to be is just another way of saying is. Mr. O'Madden Burke practices similar verbal overkill when he praises Bloom's wife as "The vocal muse, Dublin's prime favourite." If Molly is Dublin's favorite soprano, she hardly needs to be awarded the "prime" spot. Gilbert and Seidman both identify this last expression as pleonasm (PLEE-uh-naz-um, a Greek word meaning "superabundance"), which Seidman defines as "the use of more words in a sentence than necessary to express the meaning; redundancy." Exactly what difference may separate this term from tautology, if there is one, is beyond me.

Richard Nordquist (www.thoughtco.com) notes that George Carlin had fun with both terms in "Count the Superfluous Redundant Pleonastic Tautologies," a section in When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? (2004): "I needed a new beginning, so I decided to pay a social visit to a personal friend with whom I share the same mutual objectives and who is one of the most unique individuals I have ever personally met. The end result was an unexpected surprise. When I reiterated again to her the fact that I needed a fresh start, she said I was exactly right; and, as an added plus, she came up with a fi­nal solution that was absolutely perfect. Based on her past experience, she felt we needed to join together in a com­mon bond for a combined total of twenty-four hours a day, in order to find some new initiatives. What a novel innovation! And, as an extra bonus, she presented me with the free gift of a tuna fish. Right away I noticed an immedi­ate positive improvement. And although my recovery is not totally complete, the sum total is I feel much better now knowing I am not uniquely alone."

The ancient rhetoricians understood that repeating the same concept in different words is not always a bad idea, and they named the good sibling synonymia. As an example of that device Gideon Burton (rhetoric.byu.edu) cites the line in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in which the tribune Murellus calls the plebeians "You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!" (1.1.35). In King Lear Kent performs the same generation of synonyms at far greater length in his hilarious string of abusive synonyms for Oswald (2.2.15-23).