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Rather belatedly, I am sharing with readers a letter from Rossdorf
in Germany by someone who identified himself as Dr. Erhard Glogowski.
I received the e-mail as early as last May 13, but I didn’t bother
to read it because my server had suspiciously delivered it to my
spam folder. For curiosity’s sake, however, I decided to open it
three days ago before zapping it along with my usual mailbox junk.
To my pleasant surprise, it wasn’t some nasty virus-laden file but
a curious commentary on English usage.
Here’s the letter:
Dear Mr. Carillo,
For many years now, I have been a frequent
reader of your language column and I am stunned by your profound
knowledge of the English language. I highly appreciate your book
English Plain and Simple and I collect your articles that are
published weekly in The Manila Times.
Nonetheless, I would like to mention a topic
that I think you have not yet thoroughly elaborated on. It is the
ample field of synonyms and pleonasms. In your book, you devoted to
synonyms barely one page (p. 277), and you took up the subject only
briefly as part of your column No. 317. I must admit, though, that
my collection of your articles is far from complete.
Also, in spite of my poor understanding of
English idioms, I think the title of your book seems faulty and is
likely to be misunderstood. I have consulted several dictionaries,
among them the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current
English by A.S. Hornby (Oxford University Press: 1974), and I found
that the expression “plain” is congruent to “simple.” There
is therefore no difference between these two sentences: “The
student’s English is plain.” “The student’s English is
simple.” The words “plain” and “simple” mean the same
thing, so to use both in the same phrase is pure pleonasm. And by
doing this, you missed to “kill” one adjective, contrary to Mark
Twain’s strong admonition against it [“When you catch an
adjective, kill it.”].
Please don’t take offense at my comments and,
if you can find the time, do enlighten me on the proper use of
synonyms.
Here’s my reply to the letter:
Dear Dr. Glogowski,
Thank you for the compliment about my
English-usage columns and my first book, English Plain and Simple.
It warms my heart to know that even English learners outside my
country are finding my work of some use in their quest to improve
their English.
Yes, there are some obvious overlaps in the
meanings of the words “plain” and “simple,” but I don’t
think my use of both for the title of my book constitutes a
pleonasm. By definition, a pleonasm is the use of more words than
necessary to convey the same sense, as in “a lovely and beautiful
woman,” “the rich and wealthy businessman,” and “The lady in
white dress she did it.” The first two examples are obviously
pleonasms, for the adjective pairs “lovely” and “beautiful”
and “rich” and “wealthy” are each practically exact
synonyms. The third example is another type of pleonasm: the pronoun
“she” unnecessarily repeats the sense of “the lady in white
dress” and is therefore a redundancy. Indeed, redundancy is a
common feature of pleonasms.
In contrast, although they may look synonymous,
the adjectives “plain” and “simple” actually have so many
different shades of meaning. For my book’s title, in particular, I
used “plain” to mean uncomplicated and uncluttered, and
“simple” to mean clear and easy to understand. There’s a major
conceptual difference between the two, so their joint use in
modifying the word “English” doesn’t constitute a pleonasm but
simply an emphatic expression.
Please be assured that I am by no means offended
by your comments. On the contrary, I appreciate them for opening my
eyes to other aspects of English that I still need to take up to
help people get to know the language better.
j8carillo@yahoo.com
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