Redundancies

“Please forward that on to him.”

Prepositions, Redundancies

I heard this yesterday in a conference call.

Problem:
The word “on” does not belong in the sentence.

Explanation:
Someone was asking the conference-call facilitator to forward an email message to someone who was not attending the call. He said, “Please forward that on to him.”

One of the definitions of the preposition “on” is in the direction of, as in “to travel on a northerly course”.

This definition also is the primary definition of the preposition “to”.

Therefore, the preposition “on” did not belong in the conference-call attendee’s sentence.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “forward that to” — 71,600 matches
  • “forward that on to” — 26,100 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the expression correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of 2.74-to-1, which is dreadful.

Solution:
“Please forward that to him.”

“7x time Tour de France Winner”

Hyphens, Redundancies

I saw this on the Web in a banner advertisement for a nutritional product promoted by Lance Armstrong.

Problem:
The phrase contains a redundancy.

Explanation:
The banner ad is for a product named FRS, and Lance Armstrong’s portrait and Tour de France record appear in the banner.

The “x” in “7x” means “time”.

So “7x” means “7-time” — spelled 7-HYPHEN-T-I-M-E.

Therefore, either the “x” or the word “time” is redundant in “7x time Tour de France Winner”.

Solution:
“7x Tour de France Winner”
or
“7-time Tour de France Winner” (Notice the required hyphen between “7” and “time”!)

“…, and etcetera.”

Common English Blunders, Nouns, Redundancies

I heard this during a telephone call yesterday.

Problem:
The phrase is redundant.

Explanation:
The noun “etcetera” — abbreviated as “etc.” — means and other unspecified things of the same type or class.

So “and etcetera” literally means and and other unspecified things of the same type or class.

For fun, I searched Google for “and etcetera” (including the quotation marks) and found about 67,200 matches.

Suspecting that this was only part of the story, I then searched Google for “and etc.” (including the quotation marks) and found about 9,280,000 matches.

Combining the matches for the abbreviated and unabbreviated forms, that’s over 9.3 million matches for this redundant phrase!

Solution:
“…, etcetera.”