Tautological example is tautological.
The word “erudite” is an erudite word.
At the word level, the term for adjectives that apply to themselves is autological. E.g., “polysyllabic” is a polysyllabic word. The opposite is heterological. E.g., “French” is not a French word. “Blue” is not a blue word.
The billion dollar question: Is “heterological” a heterological word?
Here’s another heterological word: The word “pulchritude” means “beauty,” but I find it’s a very ugly word.
This is a pretty long sentence that starts out well, but rapidly devolves, without warning, into a meandering series of comma-separated clauses, none of which seem to be really making a move towards a point, though all of them are intelligible, and the sentence is grammatical, and just when you’re starting to wonder if it actually has or ever had a point in the author’s mind, or if if will ever end, it suddenly does.
Be brief!
TLA
Three Letter Acronym
UTE
Unnecessary TLA Extending
This is the song that never ends…
Thanks for all the awesome and amusing examples.
I was wondering if there was a term for this sort of thing, but thought it was too rare to have earned a word.
*Protip: Put a list of these examples alongside a copy of Foucault’s “This is Not A Pipe” for a quick and easy philosophical paper. *
No means no.
Unnecessary redundancy?
Or put them in this bag:
Do you mean Magritte, or are you referring to a work other than The Treachery of Images?
This sentence no verb.
I think you a word out.
I remember reading a bunch of these from William Safire when I was a kid. Here’s a few.
A writer must not shift your point of view.
It behooves you to avoid archaic expressions.
Eschew obfuscation.
Sorry, you are correct. I was indeed referring to the painting The Treachery of Images. Partly, it’s flawed memory, partly, it’s that googling Foucault and “this is not a pipe” returns many pages selling Foucalt’s book “This is Not a Pipe”, which I mistook in my quick skimming* to be the original work I was thinking of.
- I’ve learned that, here on the SDMB, even minor inaccuracies can derail a thread into tangents totally unrelated to your original meaning.
“Pretty quickly”? Didn’t Hofstadter say so in his first column? That is my recollection.
I’ve told you a million times: Don’t use hyperbole!!!
“Ending sentences with prepositions is something up with which I shall not put!”