An internet blog post about tautology

This is MC Grammar's sister, Bee-Rock.

Bee-Rock is a dancer. She loves hip-hop, jazz, contemporary and ballroom, and any other style of dance you can think of. But she has a problem. Every now and again, somebody utters the phrase 'I saw you dancing that dance last week.'

This phrase is what's known as a tautology. This makes Bee-Rock very annoyed. You see, Bee-Rock has no time for tautology. Sometimes it gets so bad that the only place she feels safe is on the dancefloor. She flees back to it and dances furiously, mascara-stained tears streaming down her face. 'No der I was '"dancing" a "dance"' she screams against the din of music to no one in particular. 'How else you do a dance?'

Tautology is when you say the same thing twice in different words. For example, the tiny little man is a tautology because it's unnecessary to say both 'tiny' and 'little'. Other examples of this are:

I'm going to raze this house to the ground.

When you threaten to raze something, it's pretty much assumed that you're going to raze it all the way to the ground.

The downstairs basement

Basements are always downstairs

One of the most common tautologies is terms like a free gift. This offender tends to come up in many varieties, such as:

A gift of wine on the house

The elephant was donated as a gift

Gifts and donations are always free, so this is where the tautology part comes in.

So do the right thing and try not to use tautologies – as Bee-Rock always says, the time you waste saying unnecessary things is time your could have spent dancing.