A Pleonasm in Spades

Pleonasm is the word for having extra words in a sentence. First panel; how many can you count? Count them before you look at the bottom of the post.

Let’s count them:

• Frequent fear
• Daily
• On a daily basis
• Constant criticism

Saying “on a daily basis” is a pleonasm all by itself! All you need is “daily.”

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A pleonasm is when you have one or more unnecessary words in a sentence. Here’s an example:

Obviously you don’t need both “still” and “yet.” But what about “shoot”?

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???

Neither, and he finally got it right. ( For the first sentence, I nearly wrote “he finally got it right in the end.” Do you know what’s wrong writing it that way? Answer at the end of the post.)

Last panel:

Yup, not a figure of speech at all.; it’s plain old text.

PS—Answer: Using both “finally” and “in the end” is needless repetition, a pleonasm.