The guard took my bag and wheeled it through an imposing bronze gate — the First National Bank of Jersey City, retrofitted into the Hyatt House Hotel. Waiting for a claim check, I did what I reflexively do — read, in this case a sign posted in front of me: "For Roof Top entrance, please go around the corner to our York Street entrance."
Ouch, you see where that clunks, don't you? That doubled "entrance." It should be, I thought, 'For Roof Top access, please go around the corner to our York Street entrance.' Eliminates the redundant word.
Sometimes using the same word over and over is powerful, each repetition resonating and building on the uses that went before. "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields..." Churchill's June 4, 1940 speech isn't improved by plucking out those last two uses of "fight" and making it something like, "We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall battle them on the landing grounds, we shall resist in the fields." It's weakened, if not wrecked.
Last week my wife and I were having bologna sandwiches for dinner — hey, it happens. She took a package of chicken bologna from the refrigerator. I'd never buy chicken bologna in a thousand years. It's like buying a beef drumstick. But bread was toasted, Plochman's applied and voila, dinner. At one point my gaze fell upon the bologna package.
"What?" my wife asked, noticing me looking.
Sometimes using the same word over and over is powerful, each repetition resonating and building on the uses that went before. "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields..." Churchill's June 4, 1940 speech isn't improved by plucking out those last two uses of "fight" and making it something like, "We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall battle them on the landing grounds, we shall resist in the fields." It's weakened, if not wrecked.
A more difficult call is when to drop redundant single words. Above, when I mentioned Churchill, first I used just his last name then, thinking of AP style, added his first, "Winston Churchill." Then lost "Winston." Some writers are so familiar there is no need for first names. "Shakespeare's sonnets" is fine. "William Shakespeare's sonnets" is overkill.
I'm amazed at how often, on labels, completely unnecessary words are left on.
"What?" my wife asked, noticing me looking.
"I'm copyediting the label," I said, tapping the motto curving along the bottom of the red and yellow logo: "Glatt Kosher Product." "You don't need the word 'Product' — 'Glatt Kosher' is sufficient. 'Product' doesn't add anything meaningful."
Of course, there's a lot of that going around.
Ah, but what about Gluten-free Kosher Product? Problem solved. You’re welcome.
ReplyDeleteWhich variety of Plochman’s?
ReplyDeleteA nice solid landing.
ReplyDeleteBut speaking mechanically rather than politically, I think the least meaningful words come from one of my many writing flaws: the impulse to emphasize a point by stringing together adjectives that are basically synonyms, such as "wonderful, astounding, magnificent," or "awful, terrible, horrible." Most times one simple accurate modifier conveys what we want to say much better than a bunch of superlatives that don't quite fit.
john
Indeed, John. As is evident from many of my comments here, I'm guilty of the same annoying, vexing, irritating tendency. ; )
DeleteSame here. As everyone here knows by now, my replies tend to be long-winded, wordy, and verbose. There, I said it again.
DeleteWhy use one adjective when you can use three? Or even more?
Makes you sound smarter (or maybe just more whiny).
Glatt kosher is also redundant, as no one in this country had ever heard of glatt until after WWII, when some ultra-Orthodox Hungarian Jews came here & insisted that kosher wasn't good enough, it had to be glatt kosher.
ReplyDeleteAccording to the helpful, friendly, Microsoft Bing chick:
DeleteGlatt kosher is a term used in Jewish dietary laws to refer to meat from animals with smooth or defect-free lungs. The term is often used informally to imply that a product was processed under a stricter standard of kashrut (Jewish dietary laws) For meat to be kosher, it must come from a kosher animal slaughtered in a kosher way. Glatt kosher takes it further; the meat must also come from an animal with adhesion-free or smooth lungs. The word “glatt” is Yiddish for “smooth” (the Hebrew word is chalak)
But, wait...there's more. I will spare you the graphic details.
I know what it means, it's flat out idiotic, saying that just kosher isn't good enough, it has to be glatt kosher. Basically, a way to give a few rabbis that inspect the meat a job & make it even more expensive than regular kosher meat!
DeleteI did it fer de goyim, most of whom were probably unaware. Hell, I myself was unaware. I never heard of glatt kosher until just now...and I'm One Of The Tribe. The kind of tribesman who has always eaten what he likes, including shellfish, and to hell with the dietary "laws" and other mishegoss. The kind who will eat Spam (treif) and brown mustard on Kosher matzo. Or at least I did, until I had to stop. Doctor's orders. I still do it anyway, maybe two or three times a year.
DeleteYep, I edit everything I see. I can't help myself. Thanks for copping to the behavior, too.
ReplyDeleteNot to go too far off topic but when I read Chicken bologna my first though was what parts of a chicken could possibly be used to make it. Most of a chicken has been claimed by other products.
ReplyDeleteI also suffer from this compulsion. If I find myself rewriting sentences in my latest murder mystery, I have learned to put it aside and move on to the next one. I have dubbed this “Compulsive Edititis” or Blue Pencil Syndrome.
ReplyDeletebut was the balogna any good? would it be enhanced by adding pistachios and a couple fat dots and makee it mortadella? these are important questions.
ReplyDeletepaul w
roscoe vil
Well, coincidentally, we just had chicken bratwurst for dinner last night. It tasted, faintly, like bratwurst...
ReplyDeleteI can't imagine it, but it must be somewhat trying to be compulsively copy-editing everything one reads. ; )
"Ouch, you see where that clunks, don't you?"
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid I clunked over this line, myself. "Ouch!" is an exclamation that oughtta stand by itself, not open a sentence.
That aside, I have long thought that one-off signage like the Roof Top (not "Rooftop"?) direction shown here needs (but rarely gets) someone who is good with both graphics and and grammar. Usually it's one or the other; sometimes it's neither.
Whenever I'm returning to a draft of something I wrote and then left for a while, my brain will tend to skip ahead of the words, as it's pretty familiar with my writing and knows where I'm going with a phrase. If my sentence goes somewhere else instead, my brain lands in the ditch, gets up, dusts itself off and orders a rewrite. My early drafts sometimes have little resemblance to what finally gets posted.
Our family exchanges photos of sign blunders we call The Inconvience Watch, named for those hastily-posted signs announcing that the coffee machine is out of order or the bank just got robbed, invariably ending with some mutant spelling of "inconvenience," as in "Sorry for the inconvience." The Roof Top sign got its spelling correct, but needed someone to walk away and come back to it for a second look.
Can I throw in a grammar peeve? The Walgreen Family established the pharmacy chain. For years the signage on the stores was 'Walgreen's' in neon. A correct possessive punctuation of their pride in ownership. Now the stores are branded in 'Walgreens' signage. Oh, for the loss of the apostrophe!
ReplyDeleteIf you look at "Roof Top entrance" as meaning the process of entering or ability to enter (similar to "access"), then maybe it's not redundant. Unnecessary perhaps.
ReplyDeleteIt's impossible to turn off this part of my brain. Restaurant menus, signs, letters from the insurance company, the gas bill, social media posts, all of them torment me.
ReplyDeleteThe best graphics and text are sometimes not the best graphics and text.
ReplyDeleteSome of my favorite signs are clearly the brain children of people who do not have a firm grasp of English because they weren't born here and they didn't learn proper grammar and punctuation.
These signs usually say to me we have good food. They're in front of restaurants and some grocers
And seemingly on some packaging, most of which I don't notice. But if you do, the object of the advertisement has accomplished its purpose, which is for you to notice it. Some of the best graphics and texts goes completely unnoticed. People come to see it as part of the landscape and it doesn't affect them
In order for advertisement to affect you, it has to be evocative even if the thing it brings out of you is yuck. That's annoying
I have to add a grammar peeve, too; one that makes me crazy. People seem to think the word "me" is bad, and we getting writing like "We invited Rosemary to have dinner with Frank and I". Makes me nuts! Also, things like "Bob and myself did blah blah " "Please bring a menu for Mary and myself." Also, I hear this all the time in commercials for prescription drugs: "Do not give to children less than 12". Shouldn't it be "younger than 12?". And no one seems to know how to use "less" and "fewer" correctly. I have more, but I'll stop now.
ReplyDeleteHere's one that makes me crazy...using "I" in a possessive form; for example, "Steve and I's date was wonderful." Also, no one seems to know when to use "bring" and when to use "take"...and "tooken" is a new word, as in "The seat was tooken by someone else." That's a beaut, imo!
Delete