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Redundant Words and Phrases

Niall O'Donnell 9 Comments

I’ve often written about the great flexibility of English, and the wide range of options it affords those who use it. The downside to that, however, is that sometimes people’s English can get too complex and confusing. There are a few reasons for this. Sometimes, the point someone wants to make is quite complex and requires long and complex structures to be expressed. At other times, one might simply want to show off their vocabulary, or indulge in a little purple prose.

So even though English allows for a variety of registers in how one uses it, I firmly believe that one should keep one’s language as simple as possible.

Occasionally though, even the best of us can indulge ourselves, and one of the common results of this is the use of redundant words or phrases, though this can also be due to honest mistakes. Here are a few of the more common redundancies in English: Continue reading →

6,999

Niall O'Donnell Leave a comment

My god, what a number. Objectively, you might think it only somewhat interesting, largely, if not solely, due to those three consecutive nines. But it has a special, infuriating significance for me. Arriving home yesterday evening and going to my laptop, one of my primary thoughts was of my blog activity while I was away, a daily thought for me.

And as I was opening the laptop, a more specific thought occurred to me: having started the blog in May, I realised that the yearly section of the stats page was now slightly more interesting. Even though I’d only been blogging for six and a bit months, I was still curious to see what my final total views was. So I had as look and it was… Continue reading →

2017

Niall O'Donnell 6 Comments

So here it is, 2017. Hopefully it’s the start of a great year for you. Hopefully none of your favourite celebrities die (but statistically, some probably will). Hopefully if you’re living in Trump’s American or in Post-Brexit Britain, things aren’t too hard for you.

Typically of course, I’m most interested in how you actually say the name of this year. Is it “twenty seventeen,” or “two thousand and seventeen?” Or even “two thousand seventeen,” if you’re American. For me, there’s no hesitation: Continue reading →

Auld Lang Syne

Niall O'Donnell 3 Comments

You might end up singing Auld Lang Syne tonight, and like a lot of people wonder, what it means, or even if it’s an English phrase. Well, it is, though strictly it’s Scots, as written by the great Scottish poet Robert “Rabbie” Burns in 1788.

The title can be translated into standard English as old long since, or long long ago, meaning that the song is about remembering long-held friendships. Which might seem like a strange song for such a forward-looking night as New Year’s Eve, but I think it’s an appropriately melancholy way to say goodbye to a year. Continue reading →

Turning over a New Leaf

Niall O'Donnell 8 Comments

It’s that time of the year when people start thinking about their New Year’s Resolutions. For the next couple of weeks you’ll probably hear the phrase to turn over a new leaf mentioned a lot. It might strike you as a strange phrase, so where does it come from? Continue reading →

A Date with Destiny

Niall O'Donnell 6 Comments

-You there, boy! What date is it today!?

-Today!? Why it’s 05/08/16!!

-Wait… so is it August or May?

Why do Americans write the date differently from the rest of the world? Not that I’m really complaining, but, well, it can be annoyingly confusing at times, especially in cases like above where the day of the month is the 12th or lower. Of course I’m just used to the European format, but I do also think it’s more logical, moving from the smallest unit to the largest. Continue reading →

All of This has Happened Before, and will Happen again…

Niall O'Donnell 10 Comments

It’s déjà vu all over again – Yogi Berra

One of the downsides to trying to post something every day, is that you occasionally have a moment when, about to start a new post, you think to yourself, Haven’t I written about this already? So you try to jog your memory, and then search your blog, but can’t find anything. Sometimes you remember touching on the topic in a previous post, but as it wasn’t the focus of that post, you decide to go ahead with this one. Other times, you still aren’t sure if you wrote about this before or not, and then decide to just go ahead with it, there are probably quite a few people who didn’t read the previous post, if it exists. That was way back when you’d just started out and no-one was reading your blog.

I had that feeling, not for the first time, this morning, but at least I’m not thinking about it too much today, as I’ve obviously changed tack and decided to write about this feeling instead. It’s a little like déjà vu, I suppose, only not quite as uncanny, because there’s probably a rational explanation for this feeling. If I haven’t already written about this topic, then I’ve probably touched briefly upon it, or written something similar. Continue reading →