I’ve heard this phrase a lot, mainly on television and in movies, usually a war film or some film that has a military or law-enforcing command structure. So my question is, if you "re-double" - and I don’t know if that’s hyphenated or not, aren’t you doing something four times? Why isn’t it just "double your effort"??? That way you’re increasing your effort twice. Why go through the extra trouble of doing it four times as hard? This phrase irritates me.
And while I’m on the subject of phrases that irritate me, I’d like to add: people saying PIN number, ATM machine, HIV virus, and VIN number. This is probably my biggest pet peeve with the American English language. I’ve heard bank tellers say "ATM machine," and one time a very well-known news anchor on NATIONAL TELEVISION said "HIV virus."
[quote author=dgale link=board=idiom;num=1036092868;start=0#0 date=10/31/02 at 14:34:28]... And while I’m on the subject of phrases that irritate me, I’d like to add: people saying PIN number, ATM machine, HIV virus, and VIN number. This is probably my biggest pet peeve with the American English language. I’ve heard bank tellers say "ATM machine," and one time a very well-known news anchor on NATIONAL TELEVISION said "HIV virus."
Please tell me why people should re-double (sorry) their efforts to not speak acronymically? ???
[quote author=dgale link=board=idiom;num=1036092868;start=0#0 date=10/31/02 at 14:34:28]So my question is, if you "re-double" - and I don’t know if that’s hyphenated or not, aren’t you doing something four times?
Interesting. Both redouble and reduplicate seem to come from Latin words (reduplare, reduplicare) meaning "to fold back" - and if you fold something back on itself, you simply double it. So double and redouble mean the same thing. Deducing (perhaps wrongly) from the etymologies given by the OED for double and redouble, this double meaning seems to be duplicated (:)) in other languages: French doubler/redoubler Spanish doblar/redoblar, Italian doppiare/raddoppiare.
However, almost as soon as the word appeared in English, it acquired the obvious alternative interpretation, to double again, as you say - particularly common in the card game bridge, where the expression is part of the bidding system in this sense.
The OED provides two separate entries for redouble, tracing its separate meanings.
It does seems like a good word to avoid entirely!
[quote author=dgale link=board=idiom;num=1036092868;start=0#0 date=10/31/02 at 14:34:28]... people saying PIN number ...
I was offered a "personal PIN number" by my bank a while back.
The only other double tautology I know of in this context relates to the British company National Car Parks (NCP), which operates a lot of urban pay-parking areas across the country - these are often referred to as "NCP car parks".
I have no problem with people speaking acronymically. The problem with PIN number, HIV virus, VIN number and ATM machine is that the extra words in there (number, virus, number, machine) are already IN the acronym: PIN stands for Personal Identification Number; HIV stands for Human Immunodeficiency Virus; VIN stands for Vehicle Identification Number; ATM stands for Automated Teller Machine. The problem I have is that when people say "ATM machine" they are essentially saying "Automated Teller Machine Machine." It’s the redundancy that bothers me, and the fact that most people are blithely unaware of the acronyms they’re throwing around. Even Peter Jennings. (A news anchor here in the U.S.)
One of those annoying pop-up ads proudly proclaims, "Your computer is broadcasting an Internet IP address!..." The ad is doubly annoying, because the "I" in "IP" already stands for "Internet"; and I work somewhere behind a firewall, and know for a fact that my IP address is not being broadcast.
I guess it’s actually triply annoying, because it’s a pop-up ad, to boot!
Not to be outdone, here’s a peculiarly NZ example. Some years ago a local bank, then known as the Auckland Savings Bank, re-branded itself as the ASB. People now refer to the ASB bank.
Grant, your investigation into "redouble" was illuminating. Here are two other words redundant in meaning: "flammable" and "inflammable." Is this only in the U.S.? WHY are there two words, with seemingly opposite meanings, that mean EXACTLY THE SAME THING? My question is also whether or not this phenomenon is an English thing, an American English thing, is it (like redouble) also found in Romance languages, is it found in all languages, even ones very different from Indo-Eurupean languages (like Mandarin or Navajo) and if so, why?
As for ATM machine, Internet IP address, ASB bank - maybe it has something to do with the way people speak English, I mean in terms of its rhythm. For example - and maybe I’m going too far out here - the iamb, in metered poetry, is a very classical, standard foot. The stress in an iambic foot is on the second syllable. It’s the most common foot in poetry, as opposed to the trochee, where the stress is on the first syllable. Perhaps people are (unconsciously) not comfortable saying an acronym where the stress doesn’t land on the first syllable, or where the syllable of the acronym has no stress at all (like IP.) I don’t know; it’s just a theory. I still find it extremely aggravating.
[quote author=dgale link=board=idiom;num=1036092868;start=0#7 date=11/01/02 at 17:20:50] Here are two other words redundant in meaning: "flammable" and "inflammable." Is this only in the U.S.?
No, both words are used in British English as well.
Blame the Romans - in Latin there are two words, too: inflammare and flammare, both meaning "to set on fire". I don’t know if that has lead to a similar pattern across the Romance languages.
The problem is that the prefix in- has two meanings: "into/within" (involve, inscribe, incoming) and "not" (incautious, injudicious, inhumane).
So inflammable literally means "able to have flame set to it", and flammable literally means "able to flame". At best there is a hair of contrast implied, between things that will ignite sponteously and things that must be set alight; I have no idea if that was the original reason for having two words in Latin. Whatever the original difference, they both mean the same thing today, with the added confusion of the in- ambiguity.
[quote author=dgale link=board=idiom;num=1036092868;start=0#7 date=11/01/02 at 17:20:50]Here are two other words redundant in meaning: "flammable" and "inflammable."
The AHD provides this usage note:
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Usage Note: Historically, flammable and inflammable mean the same thing. However, the presence of the prefix in- has misled many people into assuming that inflammable means "not flammable" or "noncombustible." The prefix -in in inflammable is not, however, the Latin negative prefix -in, which is related to the English -un and appears in such words as indecent and inglorious. Rather, this -in is an intensive prefix derived from the Latin preposition in. This prefix also appears in the word enflame. But many people are not aware of this derivation, and for clarity’s sake it is advisable to use only flammable to give warnings. ————————
This brings to mind another odd pair of words: regardless and irregardless.
Here’s the AHD’s take on them:
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Usage Note: Irregardless is a word that many mistakenly believe to be correct usage in formal style, when in fact it is used chiefly in nonstandard speech or casual writing. Coined in the United States in the early 20th century, it has met with a blizzard of condemnation for being an improper yoking of irrespective and regardless and for the logical absurdity of combining the negative ir- prefix and -less suffix in a single term. Although one might reasonably argue that it is no different from words with redundant affixes like debone and unravel, it has been considered a blunder for decades and will probably continue to be so. ————————-
[quote author=dgale link=board=idiom;num=1036092868;start=0#4 date=11/01/02 at 00:24:05]Quaternity -
I have no problem with people speaking acronymically. The problem with PIN number, HIV virus, VIN number and ATM machine is that the extra words in there (number, virus, number, machine) are already IN the acronym…It’s the redundancy that bothers me, and the fact that most people are blithely unaware of the acronyms they’re throwing around. Even Peter Jennings. (A news anchor here in the U.S.)
I’ve never thought about that before, your absolutely right!
Hmm, I just re-read my ramble about iambs versus trochees. I think I meant to say that people are uncomfortable saying an acronym where the stress lands on the first syllable, not the second. I was really drunk when I wrote that. (Just kidding.)
Actually, I’ve been thinking more about poetry and that epic Greek poetry was written in an entirely different form, dactylic hexameter. But people aren’t comfortable writing that kind of metered poetry anymore, and that’s Greek, anyway, and probably why so many people have difficulty translating a good version of the Odyssey or the Illiad. Okay, I’ve gone off on a tangent…probably the whole acronym-adding-a-word phenomenon has nothing to do with poetry. I just tend to insert poetry into most things. For example, at one point I was going to try and campaign (or whatever, work hard for, try) to have books of poetry placed in motel rooms all across America along with the trusty Bible always found in every Best Western and Motel 6 and Holiday Inn. I was talked out of the idea by someone.
Another problem with very common initialisms and acronyms is that people either lose a sense of the particular words they stand for, or fear that others may have done so. So they repeat the salient feature of the abbreviation, to make their meaning clear. So we have a "PIN number" and not just a "PIN".
I think the redundancy in usage is perhaps driven by this vague anxiety about meaning, as much as by dgale’s poetic considerations.
[quote author=brynbaker link=board=idiom;num=1036092868;start=0#13 date=11/04/02 at 13:10:17]Doubling uccurs in words too when the original meaning is forgotten. Avon means river, but we have two instances of River Avon in UK.
Doubling also occurs when the meaning may not have been known by invaders speaking another language…
