With apologies to the musicals (see page 200): Sierra, Sahara—let’s call the whole thing off.
Two points:
1) The phrase “Sahara Desert” is redundant.
2) I don’t care.
To be technical, Sahara means “desert” in Arabic. So, saying “Sahara Desert” is literally saying “desert desert.” Unlike the persnickitors, however, I don’t fret about this “problem.” And by the same token, I don’t care if someone refers to “The Sierra Nevada Mountains,” even though the phrase roughly means “The Mountains Snow-Clad Mountains” to those literate in Spanish. (Too bad there are no Sierra Montana Mountains—which would mean, roughly, “Mountains Mountains Mountains.”)
Demanding that I not use English words that happen to duplicate the meaning of non-English words is, to me, like adhering to the guideline, “When in Rome, do as the Romanians do.” (See my rant about hoi polloi on page 29 for specifics as to why.)
Specific to the Sahara, I grant you that I speak the occasional Arabic, as we all do when using such imported words as alkali (which finds its way into my daily conversations at least hourly) and alcohol (which finds its way into my daily conversations . . . well, back to the original subject. . . ). I was even speaking Arabic in a sense in my opening to this entry, by using Arabic numerals. But other than that, I tend to speak little Arabic on a daily basis. So I ask that you forgive my occasional multilingual redundancy. It might be uneducated worldliness, but it is not uneducated English.
Now, despite all that, I’ll now turn around and say that you should almost never have to say Sahara Desert. Even with the
existence of other Saharas (the casino, primarily), people will know what you mean when you use just the S-word. I strongly recommend referring to just “the Sahara” as a matter of concision, of using what the reader/listener understands the word to communicate, rather than what it literally means in another language that you didn’t happen to study in high school. This admonition springs from the same principle as not referring to “the city of Chicago” when readers/listeners understand through context, experience or both that Chicago is a city (and not because Chicago means “city,” which it doesn’t). After all, “Editing to maximize every word” is my middle name. 13
My opinion of worrying about “Sahara Desert” for reasons of purity of meaning rather than of pure wordiness can be summarized by my delight in a subtle joke I found in a Monty-Pythonesque video game called Dungeon Runners. The focal location in the game, where all players go to get equipment and store their stuff, is a small community named “Townston”—which I hereby nominate as the capital city of The Sahara Desert Desert, located along the scenic Mountains Mountains Mountains.