vexations Archive

Pleonasm

  • Posted by marcus
  • June 9, 2006

pleonasm: the use of more words than are necessary to express an idea.
I’ve developed a pet peeve recently. It involves mostly sports commentators, but plenty of other people, including business managers, who are keen on adopting phrases from sports commentators. It is the use of the phrase “question mark” to denote an unknown. Such as [...]

Weathermen should keep their opinions to themselves

  • Posted by marcus
  • January 24, 2006

There’s a weatherman on AM 750 in Atlanta who has what he calls the Mellish Meter, its an arbitrary scale of how good the weather is going to be on a given day. The problem is, what he thinks is great weather is not necessarily what I think is great weather. Yesterday was a day [...]