Such Words As These

After all, what does the loss of a premiership matter after a fine meal, a good cigar and some booze-soaked reminiscing? Sam Jones in Madrid. There are words that come close, that encapsulate something of the spirit of this word — and the word itself is spirited. On the ball, quick-witted, with-it, canny, having common sense, intuitive, someone who gets things done: I grew up in Portugal and have always felt an undercurrent of admiration, almost affection, for the espertas.

A Brazilian friend, Tatiana, though, warns of a negative sense. Someone esperto can, she says, use his or her instincts to take advantage of others; to trap or fool them into trouble. Esperta is definitely not slow, dim, unimaginative. Before celebrating a confirmation in Sicily last year, my aunt breathed a sigh of relief when she saw that her British niece was dressed appropriately enough so as not to make a bad impression in front of the extended family.

I was also relieved, as it meant I had not inflicted the curse of the brutta figura, which literally translates as bad figure, on my family. In pretty much all areas of life, whether it be in the way people dress, how they behave, how well their homes are kept or how impeccably a cake is presented and a gift wrapped, Italians strive to achieve the bella figura, or beautiful figure. With a good selfie and a good spot, you can survive an entire career without doing anything. One of the most misleading, but also most enduring, myths about German culture is that it values hard work over a good siesta.

Anyone who sincerely believes that to be the case has never tried to call a German office at one minute past five. But as a philosophy, it underpins the proudest achievements of the German labour movement and may just explain why the country has some of the highest productivity levels in Europe: Philip Oltermann in Berlin.

Sisu is an untranslatable Finnish term that blends resilience, tenacity, persistence, determination, perseverance and sustained, rather than momentary, courage: In a harsh environment and with powerful neighbours, it was what a young nation needed. Sisu is what, in , allowed an army of , Finns to twice fight off Soviet forces three times their number, inflicting losses five times heavier than those they sustained. More prosaically, it has helped Finns get through a lot of long, lonely, dark and freezing winters, building in the process one of the wealthiest, safest, most stable and best-governed countries in the world.

It is not all good, of course. Sisu can lead to stubbornness, a refusal to take advice, an inability to admit weakness, a lack of compassion. Research shows it holds little appeal to the young. It is an etiquette that is seen almost in all aspects of Iranian life, from hosts insisting on guests taking more food from the table, to the exchanges in the bazaar.

Although Ms A in reality cannot take the carpet out of the shop without paying for it, the seller might insist up to three times that she should just do that, until the amount of the price is finally mentioned. Leave it to Russia to serve up the melancholy: What can toska pronounced tahs- kah mean? Spiritual anguish, a deep pining, perhaps the product of nostalgia or love-sickness, toska is depression plus longing, an unbearable feeling that you need to escape but lack the hope or energy to do so.

Toska is the stuff of great literature. Evgeny Onegin, the foundational Russian novel-in-verse about superfluous men, unrequited love and duels? Anton Chekhov wrote an entire short story called Toska about a cabman who recently lost his son and searches for someone to talk to about his grief.

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He ends up talking to his horse. All that broodiness in the great and not-so-great Russian novels? You get the picture. So why choose toska for this list of positivity?

More Words At Play

Because if the Russian soul s the place where great emotions reside, then toska pays the rent. Without toska there cannot be delirious happiness, endless heartfelt conversations at 4am at the kitchen table, boundless generosity at obvious personal expense. Toska is a sign that your emotions go beyond logic and that you are really, truly living your emotions. In a more modern pair of words, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers dictionaries say that "electric" and "electrical" mean exactly the same thing. However, the usual adverb form is "electrically".

For example, "The glass rod is electrically charged by rubbing it with silk". This logic is in doubt, since most if not all "-ical" constructions arguably are "real" words and most have certainly occurred more than once in "reputable" publications, and are also immediately understood by any educated reader of English even if they "look funny" to some, or do not appear in popular dictionaries.

Additionally, there are numerous examples of words that have very widely accepted extended forms that have skipped one or more intermediary forms, e. At any rate, while some US editors might consider "-ally" vs. The most common definitely pleonastic morphological usage in English is " irregardless ", which is very widely criticized as being a non-word.

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According to most dictionaries that include it, "irregardless" appears to derive from confusion between "regardless" and "irrespective", which have overlapping meanings. There are several instances in Chinese vocabulary where pleonasms and cognate objects are present. Their presence usually indicate the plural form of the noun or the noun in formal context. In some instances, the pleonasmic form of the verb is used with the intention as an emphasis to one meaning of the verb, isolating them from their idiomatic and figurative uses.

But over time, the pseudo-object, which sometimes repeats the verb, is almost inherently coupled with the it. One can also find a way around this verb, using another one which does not is used to express idiomatic expressions nor necessitate a pleonasm, because it only has one meaning:. There is no relationship found between Chinese and English regarding verbs that can take pleonasms and cognate objects. Although the verb to sleep may take a cognate object as in "sleep a restful sleep", it is a pure coincidence, since verbs of this form are more common in Chinese than in English; and when the English verb is used without the cognate objects, its diction is natural and its meaning is clear in every level of diction, as in "I want to sleep" and "I want to have a rest".

In some cases, the redundancy in meaning occurs at a syntactic level above the word, such as at the phrase level:. The redundancy of these two well-known statements is deliberate, for humorous effect. But one does hear educated people say "my predictions about the future of politics" for "my predictions about politics", which are equivalent in meaning.

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While predictions are necessarily about the future at least in relation to the time the prediction was made , the nature of this future can be subtle e. Generally "the future" is assumed, making most constructions of this sort pleonastic. The latter humorous quote above about not making predictions — by Yogi Berra — is not really a pleonasm, but rather an ironic play on words.

Redundancy, and "useless" or "nonsensical" words or phrases, or morphemes can also be inherited by one language from the influence of another, and are not pleonasms in the more critical sense, but actual changes in grammatical construction considered to be required for "proper" usage in the language or dialect in question. Irish English , for example, is prone to a number of constructions that non-Irish speakers find strange and sometimes directly confusing or silly:.

All of these constructions originate from the application of Irish Gaelic grammatical rules to the English dialect spoken, in varying particular forms, throughout the island.

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Seemingly "useless" additions and substitutions must be contrasted with similar constructions that are used for stress, humor, or other intentional purposes, such as:. Sometimes editors and grammatical stylists will use "pleonasm" to describe simple wordiness. This phenomenon is also called prolixity or logorrhea. The reader or hearer does not have to be told that loud music has a sound, and in a newspaper headline or other abbreviated prose can even be counted upon to infer that "burglary" is a proxy for "sound of the burglary" and that the music necessarily must have been loud to drown it out, unless the burglary was relatively quiet this is not a trivial issue, as it may affect the legal culpability of the person who played the music ; the word "loud" may imply that the music should have been played quietly if at all.

Many are critical of the excessively abbreviated constructions of " headline -itis" or " newsspeak ", so "loud [music]" and "sound of the [burglary]" in the above example should probably not be properly regarded as pleonastic or otherwise genuinely redundant, but simply as informative and clarifying. Prolixity is also used simply to obfuscate, confuse, or euphemize and is not necessarily redundant or pleonastic in such constructions, though it often is.

Redundant forms, however, are especially common in business, political, and even academic language that is intended to sound impressive or to be vague so as to make it hard to determine what is actually being promised, or otherwise misleading. In contrast to redundancy, an oxymoron results when two seemingly contradictory words are adjoined. These sentences use phrases which mean, respectively, "the the restaurant restaurant", "the the tar tar", "with in juice sauce" and so on. However, many times these redundancies are necessary—especially when the foreign words make up a proper noun as opposed to a common one.

For example, "We went to Il Ristorante" is acceptable provided the audience can infer that it is a restaurant if they understand Italian and English it might likely, if spoken rather than written, be misinterpreted as a generic reference and not a proper noun, leading the hearer to ask "Which ristorante do you mean? But avoiding the redundancy of the Spanish phrase in the second example would only leave an awkward alternative: This is also similar to the treatment of definite and indefinite articles in titles of books, films, etc. Some cross-linguistic redundancies, especially in placenames, occur because a word in one language became the title of a place in another e.

A supposed extreme example is Torpenhow Hill in Cumbria , if etymologized as meaning "hill" in the language of each of the cultures that have lived in the area during recorded history, could be translated as "Hillhillhill Hill". See the List of tautological place names for many more examples. In all the examples listed above, the word after the acronym repeats a word represented in the acronym—respectively, "Personal Identification Number number", "Automated Teller Machine machine", "Random Access Memory memory", "Human Immunodeficiency Virus virus", "Content Management System system".

See RAS syndrome for many more examples. The expansion of an acronym like PIN or HIV may be well known to English speakers, but the acronyms themselves have come to be treated as words, so little thought is given to what their expansion is and "PIN" is also pronounced the same as the word "pin"; disambiguation is probably the source of "PIN number"; "SIN number" for "Social Insurance Number number" [ sic ] is a similar common phrase in Canada.

But redundant acronyms are more common with technical e. Some redundancies are simply typographical. For instance, when a short inflexional word like "the" occurs at the end of a line, it is very common to accidentally repeat it at the beginning of the line, and a large number of readers would not even notice it.

Carefully constructed expressions, especially in poetry and political language, but also some general usages in everyday speech, may appear to be redundant but are not. This is most common with cognate objects a verb's object that is cognate with the verb:.

The words need not be etymologically related, but simply conceptually, to be considered an example of cognate object:. Such constructions are not actually redundant unlike "She slept a sleep" or "We wept tears" because the object's modifiers provide additional information. A rarer, more constructed form is polyptoton , the stylistic repetition of the same word or words derived from the same root:. As with cognate objects, these constructions are not redundant because the repeated words or derivatives cannot be removed without removing meaning or even destroying the sentence, though in most cases they could be replaced with non-related synonyms at the cost of style e.

In many cases of semantic pleonasm, the status of a word as pleonastic depends on context.

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The relevant context can be as local as a neighboring word, or as global as the extent of a speaker's knowledge. In fact, many examples of redundant expressions are not inherently redundant, but can be redundant if used one way, and are not redundant if used another way. The "up" in "climb up" is not always redundant, as in the example "He climbed up and then fell down the mountain. For example, most English speakers would agree that "tuna fish" is redundant because tuna is a kind of fish. However, given the knowledge that "tuna" can also refer a kind of edible prickly pear, [13] the "fish" in "tuna fish" can be seen as non-pleonastic, but rather a disambiguator between the fish and the prickly pear.

Conversely, to English speakers who do not know Spanish, there is nothing redundant about "the La Brea tar pits" because the name "La Brea" is opaque: Similarly, even though scuba stands for "self-contained underwater breathing apparatus", a phrase like "the scuba gear" would probably not be considered pleonastic because "scuba" has been reanalyzed into English as a simple word, and not an acronym suggesting the pleonastic word sequence "apparatus gear".

Similar examples are radar and laser. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Use of more words or word parts than is necessary for clear expression. Not to be confused with Neoplasm. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources.

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