In Loss of Breath (1832), Edgar Allan Poe wrote:
‘I lie,’ forsooth! and ‘hold my tongue,’ to be sure!
Forsooth means ‘in truth’. Sooth is an old word for truth. Soothsayers supposedly tell truths about the future. It was a neat oxymoron: a self-contradictory statement; the opposite of a tautology. Oxymoron is an odd word. The moron bit is easy to guess at, but the oxy bit only evokes echoes of oxygen. Improbable as it may seem, oxymoron and oxygen are directly linked.
OED2 defines oxymoron as ‘A rhetorical figure by which contradictory or incongruous terms are conjoined so as to give point to the statement or expression’. So bitter-sweet and harmonious discord and heated agreement are all oxymorons. And by characterising a conjunction of elements as an oxymoron, a point can be made. So: military intelligence and honest lawyer are said by people of various prejudices to be oxymorons. In a more lofty academic way, the Quarterly Review CLX 289 said: ‘Voltaire … we might call, by an oxymoron which has plenty of truth in it, an “Epicurean pessimist.”’
Even with that cultural hint, the link to oxygen may still remain obscure. Voltaire was the pseudonym of François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), who lived in Paris all his life. Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794) also lived in Paris and, although younger, doubtless knew Voltaire. Lavoisier was a chemist who first adopted, but later debunked, the phlogiston theory, which had been proposed by Georg Stahl almost a century earlier. Lavoisier had been conducting experiments which sought to explain the processes of combustion and calcination. At the same time, in London, Joseph Priestley was pursuing similar research. When Priestley was in Paris in 1774, he dined with Lavoisier and told him of the gaseous element that he had just isolated as one component of air. He referred to it as ‘dephlogisticated air’. Lavoisier (fired up, as it were, by the dinner conversation) returned to his laboratory and completed the experiments, in which he was able to show that combustion and calcination both involved the combination of the newly isolated gas with the material that burned or rusted. He named the gas oxygen — ‘the generator of acids’. The Greek root oxy- means ‘sharp, keen, acute, pungent, acid’. On the same pattern, hydrogen is so called because of its role in creating water. Thus oxymoron (sharp + stupid) is a word which is an example of itself.
Oxymoron’s opposite is tautology. A tautology is a word or (more commonly) a statement which repeats itself or which involves self-referring logic. In the TV quiz show Mastermind, the following exchange occurred:
Q: What is a tautology?
A: Repeating the same thing twice.
This unwittingly impeccable answer is cited by Alex Buzo as the genesis of his entertaining book Tautology (Penguin, 1981). Buzo’s note at the start of the book discloses that he had been trying to eradicate tautologies from our public speech, but had failed. The book is a wonderful collection of snippets gathered during his campaign. With the benefit of another 28 years’ observation, it is obvious that the campaign has had no further success. Until I looked at Tautology again recently, I had forgotten that the notion had been a subject of general discussion and interest in the 1980s.
The OED2 defines tautology as:
A repetition of the same statement. The repetition (esp. in the immediate context) of the same word or phrase, or of the same idea or statement in other words: usually as a fault of style.
There are two distinct forms of tautology. One is a statement which repeats itself in different words. Examples from Buzo’s book include ‘detached aloofness’, ‘pregnant mothers-to-be’, ‘wandering nomad’, and ‘bargain basement downstairs’. It is common even now to hear people speak of ‘new innovations’.
A tautology can also take a much subtler form, where the statement involves not a repetition but a logical circularity. It is a common fault in arguments which appear to accumulate evidence but in fact go around in circles, such as ‘My client is an honest man who did not steal the goods’. Since a person who steals is not an honest person, it is a logical circularity to say that he is honest and did not steal. In Dietrich’s case, Gaudron J had to deal with the question whether the expression ‘fair trial according to law’ was a tautology. She said that it was not:
In most cases a trial is fair if conducted according to law, and unfair if not. If our legal processes were perfect that would be so in every case. But the law recognizes that sometimes, despite the best efforts of all concerned, a trial may be unfair even though conducted strictly in accordance with law. (177 CLR 362)
Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that all necessary propositions are tautologies and that accordingly all necessary propositions say the same thing — namely, nothing at all. Perhaps that is why we use tautologies so much: they help us satisfy the urge to speak, without demanding the effort of thought.
There is a substantial overlap between tautology and its lesser-known relative pleonasm. The OED2 defines pleonasm as:
The use of more words in a sentence than are necessary to express the meaning; redundancy of expression (either as a fault of style, or as a figure purposely used for special force or clearness) …
This is the fault, so common in legal drafting, that the High Court had in mind in Muir v The Open Brethren (96 CLR 166). The court had to deal with a testamentary provision for:
relieving cases of need and distress and in assisting persons in indigent circumstances and in particular … in assisting and relieving persons who have been or shall be adversely affected by the effects of the War in which the British Commonwealth of Nations is now engaged …
They said:
There is a considerable amount of tautology in the provision. The same conception of poverty is referred to by the words ‘need’, ‘distress’ and ‘indigent’. It is hard to distinguish between ‘relief’ in the case of ‘need and distress’ and ‘assistance’ in the case of indigency [sic].
Pleonasm would have been more accurate, but would have sent the reading public in frenzied hordes to the dictionary. Tautology has taken the field for itself.
Swift wrote in Gulliver’s Travels: ‘[T]here was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving, by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black and black is white, according as they are paid.’ This is a favourite accusation made against lawyers. Johnson was no friend to lawyers, but once said: ‘It is unjust, Sir, to censure lawyers for multiplying words, when they argue; it is often necessary for them to multiply words.’
Despite the capacity of lawyers to multiply words according as they are paid, pleonasm rarely finds its way into the law reports. In R v Johnson (1991), Millhouse J referred to it as ‘an elegant but not often heard word’. In Anstee v Coltis Pty Ltd (1995), Nielson J used pleonasm unselfconsciously and without explanation, but perhaps that reflects the elevated linguistic standards of the NSW Compensation Court. In Southern Cross Interiors Pty Ltd v DCT (2001), Palmer J referred to ‘a surfeit of pleonasms’, which itself probably qualifies as a pleonasm.
In the federal jurisdiction, pleonasm has only been used once in a judgement, so far as I can find. Lindsay FM, with a very delicate eye to the distinction, said:
the Tribunal’s characterisation of the religious violence in Nigeria as ‘random and sporadic’ is, if not tautologous, then, at least, a pleonasm. (SBWD v Minister for Immigration (2007) FMCA 1156)
But the high point must surely be the decision of the NSW Administrative Appeals Tribunal in Re Adam Boyd Munro and Collector of Customs (NSW) (1984):
[The draftsman] has used the three words ‘costs, charges and expenses’. As they are used in an Act of Parliament, we cannot assume that each is synonymous for the other … Together the three words form a pleonasm put together for the sake of emphasis. Looked at another way, they could be regarded as a statutory heniadys [sic].
The tribunal no doubt intended hendiadys: ‘A figure of speech in which a single complex idea is expressed by two words connected by a conjunction; e.g. by two substantives with “and” instead of an adjective and substantive.’ Hendiadys is fairly obscure. It is a literary device, mostly poetic, in which several words are joined by ‘and’ instead of subordinating one to the other. Fowler gives as an example: ‘nice and cool’ instead of ‘nicely cool’. With this device, a single idea is being expressed in two words, one of which could sensibly have been used to qualify the other in order to convey the same idea. Hendiadys is not apt to describe expressions such as ‘whisky and soda’ or ‘assault and battery’, where the parts are different but of equivalent value. Much less is it suitable to describe a repetitive concatenation of words such as ‘costs, charges, and expenses’, which is just a pleonasm.
The true meaning of hendiadys was recognised by Beaumont, Wilcox, and Lindgren JJ in Airservices Australia v Monarch Airlines Ltd (1998):
even if s 67 is treated as analogous to a ‘hendiadys’ (i.e. a single idea expressed in two sets of words with the conjunction ‘and’) …
And it was accurately explained, and illustrated, by Heydon J in Victims Compensation Fund Corporation v Brown (2003):
hendiadys — an expression in which a single idea is conveyed by two words connected by a conjunction, like ‘law and heraldry’ to mean ‘heraldic law’.
A cousin to hendiadys is zeugma, and its identical twin syllepsis. Syllepsis means ‘taken together’. Zeugma comes from the Greek word meaning yoke. These words were once a subject of great confusion. So great was the confusion, in fact, that the first edition of Fowler gives as an example of syllepsis: ‘Miss Bolo went home in floods of tears and a sedan chair’, and the same sentence is used to illustrate zeugma in the first edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (of which Fowler was one of the authors). The distinction between them is so narrow that it can be conveniently ignored.
Burchfield, editor of the third edition of Fowler, notes that: ‘Classical scholars continue to observe the distinctions between … syllepsis and zeugma, but in practice syllepsis is no longer applied to any English rhetorical device of the present day. The ancient distinctions have lost their usefulness in late 20th century English’.
The reason there is so little confusion about these terms nowadays is that almost no one uses either of them any more, although we may vaguely recognise the things they describe.
Zeugma and syllepsis link two terms together such that the linking term does double grammatical service:
‘Here, thou, great Anna whom three realms obey, Dost sometimes counsel take — and sometimes tea.’ (Alexander Pope, who would have pronounced tea as tay)
‘She lowered her standards by raising her glass, Her courage, her eyes, and his hopes.’ (Flanders and Swann)
In zeugma the yoking is done in such a way that no grammatical error is made, whereas in syllepsis one part of the yoking involves a grammatical fault. Or is it the other way round?