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You’d think that no one truly interested in either culture or the arts would use the tautology “cultural arts”. After all, the arts are a part of culture and culture includes a variety arts. Either “culture” or “the arts” will do – and will certainly be more accurate than using the phrase “cultural arts”. (more…)

It’s not enough that you’ve bored me rigid with that overused tailoring metaphor, “bespoke”. By pairing it with “customised”, a word meaning exactly the same, you’re telling me you think I’m too dim to understand what you’re getting at. (more…)

This week’s tautology is a phrase that seems to precede every bulleted list in every corporate document I come across: “include, among (or amongst) others”. (And the 2,444,000 instances of the phrase returned by a quick Google search prove that this tautology is, indeed, rife). (more…)

In my last post on tautology, I talked about how desperate and untrustworthy the tautological phrase “worldwide, global business” sounds. And no doubt the employees of all “worldwide, global businesses” are also committed to the equally tautological “working in partnership together”. (more…)

Last week I launched Tautology Tuesdays, a series of posts on the repetition of the same idea in different words. In that post I pointed out that tautology can make you sound desperate and untrustworthy – like you’re trying too hard to get your point across.

This week’s common tautology crime illustrates the point perfectly: “worldwide, global business” (or “global, worldwide business”). (more…)

You’re proud of your business and you want to tell people about it, right? So you figure the more you emphasise what’s great about your product (or service or skill) the more impact your words will have.

Well not if you fall into the trap of tautology. (more…)