At home, either my parents or my educationally superior older brothers would correct me. Today, however, adults rarely correct young people's grammatical errors, perhaps because they don't recognize the errors. Turn on the evening news and any number of so-called educated folk, physicians, lawyers, Congressmen, Senators, judges, and the President, will tell you that once they refer back to their notes, they will report back to you. Redundancy is so insidiously ingrained in our every-day communication that we have all but ratified it. Recipes instruct cooks to mix the ingredients together or worse yet, mix the combined ingredients together .
Coaches teach youngsters the basic fundamentals of their sport.
Cryptographers labor to crack secret codes . Teachers frequently tell parents that their children aren't working to their full potential . Despite our being the most educated society in the world, we seem to be tautologically challenged . The profusion of computers has also done serious damage to language. Yesterday, a faculty member wrote me a memo, informing me that he wanted to schedule an interface with me.