Nouns

“Free Gift”

Adjectives, Common English Blunders, Nouns, Redundancies

I see and hear this phrase a lot.

Problem:
The adjective creates a redundancy.

Explanation:
The noun “gift” in this phrase means a thing or experience voluntarily given without any kind of reciprocal payment required or expected.

So the adjective “free” creates a redundancy when combined with the noun “gift”.

For fun, I searched Google for “free gift” (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about 9,110,000 matches.

Not all of these matches were what I was seeking. For example, Google returned “Free Gift-Giving Labels”, but this does not agree with the sense of the phrase “Free Gift”.

However, I am sure that many millions of the returned matches did agree with the sense of the phrase, which obviously makes this phrase a common English blunder.

Solution:
“Gift”

“Next days of observance of agents’ use of the tool”

Nouns

I saw this phrase yesterday in an email message.

Problem:
The noun “observance” is the wrong one for this phrase.

Explanation:
The phrase appeared in an email message about what an observer saw.

The phrase introduced the list of what he observed in subsequent days when he watched troubleshooting agents use a particular software application.

The noun “observance” has some eight definitions, the most popular of which include

  • an act of conforming to,
  • a celebration by appropriate ceremonies, and
  • a ceremony for a particular occasion.

Given that observation is one of the least popular definitions of the noun “observance”, it is best to avoid using “observance” when “observation” is the much clearer noun.

Solution:
“Next days of observation of agents’ use of the tool”

“Change of venue location”

Adjectives, Hyphens, Nouns, Redundancies

I saw this yesterday in a TV commercial.

Problem:
This phrase contains a redundancy.

Explanation:
“Change of venue location” appeared in Houston, Texas, in a television advertisement from Disney on Ice, an ice-skating theatrical performance company.

Disney put the phrase in the TV ad apparently because of Hurricane Ike’s impact on Houston.

If the phrase were approximately correct, then a hyphen should have been placed between “Change” and “of”, and another hyphen should have been placed between “of” and “venue”, so as to create a compound modifier of the noun “location”.

However, the noun “venue” and the noun “location” in modern parlance have come to mean the same thing, so this phrase contains a redundancy.

Beyond the redundancy, it is preferable to reserve the use of the noun “venue” to refer to the scene of a crime or to where a jury is convened.

This gives us the solution.

Solution:
“Change of location”