Idioms

English (and other languages, of course) has jillions of idioms, common phrases that don’t mean exactly what they say.

Here’s one list:

Can you add to the list?

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After the title, hardly anything to say about this.

It’d be fun if you could actually do this…

I seem to be on a pleonasm kick. I’ve posted on this subject (unnecessary words) several times lately. Well, here’s another. Can you see it?

If you said that the word “different” is unnecessary, you’d be correct. “Different is unnecessary,” hence we have a pleonasm.

Redundancy is when you say the same thing twice. It’s a sub-type of the error we call a pleonasm, unnecessary words.

You can see the repetition, right?

“Betcha” is a contraction of “I bet you.” So you have “you” twice, right???

I might have addressed “none” before, but this example strikes me as a good illustration of the effect of context.

After all, none is a contraction of “not (even) one.” That’s a singular, right? But the context of the word often says none of [a group of something], and we grab that plural object of “of” to signal the number of “none.” Technically, this is incorrect. We get the number of a verb from its subject, not from some modifying phrase. This is easier to say if you take out that prepositional phrase: “None is how many cookies you get before supper.”

Well, how about this example? Last panel:

Singular doesn’t feel right, does it? If she had said “not one,” the singular feels better…