Ask LLOG: Re-use considered harmful?
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From RfP:
I’m one of those writers who will do just about anything to avoid using the same word—or, worse yet, the same phrase—within a short run of text. So imagine my horror this morning when, after hastily responding to a comment on your post about “Parse depth in essays vs. novels”, I noticed the following:
Although he is indeed making a case for the combination of text and images in “static print,” as becomes clear in the rest of the paragraph from which I have drawn this excerpt, I feel one can also infer that this quote provides yet one more reason for authors to make their case with, shall we say, salients rather than by means of a lengthy siege.
In spite of my haste in composing this comment, I still took care to ensure that I had spelled everything correctly, and that my syntax was appropriate for the formal register that I was using for my comment.
And I did happen to notice that I had used “one” twice within the same clause, but since that word was used in two different senses and I was in a hurry, I decided to let it stand.
After noticing—and agonizing over—my error with the phrase, I wondered about why this attitude is so deeply ingrained. So I decided to ask you about it, in hopes that there’s an underlying linguistic issue behind it.
I generally share RfP's editorial instinct, though I don't know much about this issue.
Two things occur to me.
First, re-use violations are naturally encouraged by the phenomenon of "self-priming" — see this or this. (And if you're not familiar with the concept of psychological priming, Wikipedia is here to help …)
And second — even though there's lots of advice Out There about avoiding repetition of words and phrases — there are also many kinds of lexical and phrasal repetition that are effective enough as rhetorical devices to have names going back to classical Greece. How do we distinguish bad re-use from good re-use?
Then there's Donald J. Trump:
"Donald Trump's repetitive rhetoric", 12/5/2015
"Trump's rhetorical style", 12/26/2015
"Stark rhetoric", 1/24/2016
"Trump the thing explainer", 3/19/2016
"Gertrude Trump", 6/19/2016
Update — Robert T. McQuaid and Michael P make the excellent point that in technical writing, exact repetition is often necessary to avoid ambiguity or outright misdirection. The same issue arises in legal writing.
Update #2 — David Marjanović's comment (which mentions a German secretary changing "statistically significant" to "numerically interesting") reminds me of a more negative reason to create varied phrases, namely the use of thesaurusizing to fool plagiarism-detection algorithms, e.g. turning "breast cancer" into "bosom peril", or "signal to noise ratio" into "flag to clamor proportion" — see this post…
Taylor, Philip said,
December 5, 2022 @ 6:17 am
For myself, I prefer to respect Fowler's advice regarding "elegant variation"— "variation should take place only when there is some awkwardness, such as ambiguity or noticeable monotony, in the word avoided" [1].
[1] Fowler, Henry W. And Fowler F. G. The King's English. Oxford University Press, 1906 pp.~175–179.
Michael P said,
December 5, 2022 @ 6:42 am
As an engineer, I often write requirements and design descriptions. In this context, variation in terminology implies a (typically significant) difference in referent. Accordingly, re-use clarifies that the document is referring to the same concept in each place.
Robert T McQuaid said,
December 5, 2022 @ 6:45 am
The rule against re-use has to be scrupulously avoided in technical writing.
When referring to the adder overflow register, the next mention may be abbreviated to overflow register. This leaves the reader puzzled. Are these two ways of naming the the same register, or two different ones? Always refer to a technical term in full, or define a nickname for it: adder overflow register (AOR).
astrange said,
December 5, 2022 @ 6:46 am
I'm under the impression that this feels worse writing in English than in other languages. Japanese writers don't mind repeating words in a sentence as much, so this comes up in translations, though I don't have an example on hand.
I've always wondered if, say, German cares about this as much. (<- sentence edited to avoid repeating "other languages")
David Marjanović said,
December 5, 2022 @ 7:27 am
German in particular cares about this to a comical extent. One of the first things I was taught in the first grade was not to repeat words (and also not to start two sentences the same way – much easier in German than in English). If you follow sports journalism in German, you'll quickly learn which otherwise unknown village every single sportsball player is from, because "the $VILLAGEer" is the laziest way to avoid repeating the player's name.
The classical horror story dates from the time when every professor had his own secretary. So there was this professor who gave his manuscript to his secretary to type up properly. She was horrified to see "statistically significant" repeated again and again, and changed most instances to things like "numerically interesting"…
David Marjanović said,
December 5, 2022 @ 7:29 am
…like… it was marked as an error if a word occurred on two different pages of a five-page essay.
Hans Adler said,
December 5, 2022 @ 8:36 am
As a German, I deny that German culture cares about this issue to an extreme extent. In fact, the idea that a little, unobtrusive word such as "one" shouldn't be repeated in the same sentence (even when the two uses are so different that they are arguably homonyms), or that a significant word must not appear twice (presumably: without good reason) in a five-page essay, are so foreign to me that they almost make me wonder if my calendar is off and it's April Fools Day.
The former sounds to me like following the letter rather than the spirit of a more limited rule that actually makes sense. For once, Strunk and White are not to blame for this. (I checked: they only suggest that when repeating a statement for emphasis you probably need to vary its form.) The latter sounds to me like a rule that is very specific to teaching a foreign language, where you want to prevent students from getting by with a limited vocabulary.
As I understand it, the actual sensible rule is roughly this: Repetitions of a specific word can be awkward if they happen often or within a short space. This applies less to words whose repetition is justified by their being generally unobtrusive (on a scale from "to" to "blasé"; note that "shall not" and "interface" are less obtrusive in a formal standard than in a novel), and it applies more when the repetition has a similar grammatical function. The awkwardness comes from such words drawing undue attention, so this does not apply when the repetition is for emphasis. As a rule of thumb, a content word should not normally be repeated in the following sentence, or many times on a single page, without good reason. Repetition can draw undue attention even for personal pronouns, but normally only if the same pronoun is used with the same referent several times in quick succession.
Andreas Johansson said,
December 5, 2022 @ 8:39 am
As far as I recall, avoidance of repetition was not particularly stressed in my (Swedish) schooling. I do recall a classmate being faulted for writing a sequence of sentences each begining with "I", but reflecting on it a quarter century or more later, I suspect that the teacher's problem was less the repetition as such than a failure to connect the sentences with appropriate adverbials or the like.
Lukas Daniel Klausner said,
December 5, 2022 @ 10:18 am
As an Austrian, I have to contradict Hans and agree with David's observations. It's almost comical how cliché German(-language) newspaper articles can read, e.g. using “die Alpenrepublik” to avoid using “Österreich” a second time.
I'm sure it varies with context and type of text, but at least for newspapers, I have the same impression David does.
Hans Adler said,
December 5, 2022 @ 11:14 am
Lukas Daniel is certainly right about German-language newspapers, but that's not a general practice but something that newspapers are sometimes ridiculed for. My understanding is that this ridicule is not just because of the schematic and clumsy way to avoid repetitions (which is often a lot worse than the repetitions themselves could ever be), but also because it's so unnecessary in the first place. I am less certain about this last point, but I am very confident that I have never come across requests for excessive avoidance of repetition in school.
Rick said,
December 5, 2022 @ 11:55 am
When I read the original post, I thought the issue was going to be in regards to "making a case" // "make their case".
Daniel Barkalow said,
December 5, 2022 @ 1:09 pm
I think using the same word twice in English emphasizes that it's really the same. This is something you want to do in many cases in technical writing and rhetoric, but not something you want to do in all writing. If two people are having a conversation, you don't want to emphasize the fact that the entire scene is repetition of the event of a person speaking (unless you're expressing the narrator's boredom with the conversation), so you need to use a lot of different words for the same action.
Hans Adler said,
December 5, 2022 @ 1:30 pm
I have now looked this up in a German style guide for journalists ("Stilistik für Journalisten", 2nd ed., 2010), published by VS Verlag (part of Springer). It does not present repetitions as something to avoid under all circumstances, but treats repetitions and use of synonyms briefly in a more holistic way. It explains when and how you can use repetition to achieve a stylistic effect, and it also explains how you can use synonyms to achieve another stylistic effect. Their only example is "sprunghaft ansteigen" ("rise abruptly") followed by the synonym "hochschnellen" ("skyrocket") in the next sentence. [I just corrected 'following' to 'next' for stylistic reasons, so I am not actually an extremist in terms of leniency!]
The journalistic practice to overdo it is addressed already in the introduction, where they quote from a 1984 book on journalistic style (Alexander von Hoffmann: "Sprache im Journalismus") which criticized it: "Weitschweifigkeit, Wiederholungen, Dreschen von leerem Stroh – das sind Formen von Redundanz, die jedem Stil schaden, dem journalistischen aber besonders, da sie die flüchtige Rezeption erschweren oder unmöglich machen […]. Wenn über Japan geschrieben wird, darf auch von Japan die Rede sein, muß es nicht als Land des Lächelns oder der aufgehenden Sonne oder sonstwie blumig umschrieben werden.“
My translation: "Verboseness, repetitions, beating about the bush – these are forms of redundance that harm every style, but especially harm journalistic style, because they hinder perfunctory reception or make it impossible […]. When writing about Japan, you may mention Japan, needn't circumscribe it as the land of smiles or of the rising son, or in some other florid way."
For clarity: These examples of circumscriptions for Japan are even worse than what you typically see in German-language newspapers.
—
I also checked the 1978 3rd edition of a style guide, "Stilistik" by Asmuth and Berg-Ehlers, for students of German literature, from Westdeutscher Verlag. It is very theoretical and basically just regurgitates what rhetoricians wrote in antiquity. As absurd and impractical as this is — this is exactly how I remember the topic being treated in school in the 1980s. Not really trying to give style advice at least minimizes the risk of teachers making up bad rules while trying to explain good ones.
—
I could not find anything like a German Fowler or a German Strunk & White. That's not to say such books do not exist, but none of them seems to be generally accepted, or even generally known. I felt that it had to be that way, given that I could not think of a single book in the genre other than the Duden style dictionary (which does not include a style guide), but now I am sure.
David Morris said,
December 5, 2022 @ 2:36 pm
In his original paragraph, RP re-uses 'I', 'the' and 'for' (and possibly more). There is obviously a limit to how far this this rule extends.
Sven said,
December 5, 2022 @ 3:35 pm
As a German native speaker I am aware that comical avoidance of repetition occurs in german prose. However, I find it more noticable in Italian newspapers, for example the tendency to refer to even local or minor provincial government entities by the name of the building or the street they are located in when they are mentioned the second time in a text.
I also noticed Italian newspapers getting into dangerous territory when they run out of politically correct synonyms for ethnical groups. It seems sometimes the urge to avoid repetition trumps the need to avoid outdated or problematic terms for ethnic groups.
Julian said,
December 5, 2022 @ 4:52 pm
Can I gently suggest that RfP, instead of agonising, should try to abandon this pointless obsession altogether?
The idea that the repeated 'one' in the sample sentence is poor style is particularly silly.
For an amusing take on this issue, google 'popular orange vegetables and silly synonyms'.
It's really a matter of equine quadrupeds for racetracks, not inelastic stipulations.
VVOV said,
December 5, 2022 @ 5:09 pm
I recall being taught this repetition-avoidance style rule in school too (American English speaker), but I have never heard anyone espouse that it extends to words as semantically light as “one”. I had to reread RfP’s quoted comment several times to even find the repeated word! Furthermore, their two uses of “one” are arguably two *different* words (the indefinite pronoun, and the number). I think few of even the most recondite prescriptivists would object to this particular repetition of “one”.
IMO, the most interesting point raised in this discussion is the deliberate use vs avoidance of repetition as a marker of “technical” vs “non technical” writing.
Julian said,
December 5, 2022 @ 5:23 pm
Great stylists of the past didn't worry too much about this supposed rule.
Luckily.
If they had?
Lincoln: 'But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we are unable to consecrate—it is impossible for us to hallow—this ground.'
Churchill: 'We shall fight on the beaches, we shall engage on the landing grounds, we shall clash in the fields and in the streets…'
Lear, holding the body of Cordelia: 'Thou'lt come no more – never, not once, absolutely not. I really can't see it happening.'
Joseph Post said,
December 5, 2022 @ 5:26 pm
Fowler (Modern English Usage, 1926) particularly disparaged repetition of a word within a sentence when the two occurrences used the word in different senses. He referred to this as "Legerdemain with Two Senses."
Philip Anderson said,
December 5, 2022 @ 5:44 pm
I’ve noticed English journalists being so keen to use different words that they don’t notice when they aren’t synonyms – alternating British and English, or Britain and England, is particularly annoying (they are technical terms). “This country” might be another variation, or might indicate the writer doesn’t know which country is involved.
mollymooly said,
December 5, 2022 @ 6:13 pm
I think many British journalists enjoy sneaking extravagant synonyms into their copy to see if any slip through the subeditor's revisions. The secondmentions twitter account, which collects examples, reads like schoolboys giggling at having fooled oblivious teacher into saying something naughty
My French C2 textbook gave examples of the kind of florid périphrases regarded as model style for French prose. One subtype with a Wikipedia page: the language of Shakespeare/ Molière/ Goethe/ etc.
Tim said,
December 5, 2022 @ 6:16 pm
@Rick : Is the "making a case"/"make their case" *not* the repetition in question? I was also assuming that that was what it was about.
Taylor, Philip said,
December 5, 2022 @ 6:19 pm
English journalists or British, fellow Philip ? I ask because The Times, for example, is a British newspaper, not an English one, and unless one has access to the census returns of its journalists, one might do better to think of them as British journalists rather than English journalists …
RfP said,
December 5, 2022 @ 6:41 pm
Thank you for the comments, everyone!
I will have more to say in a subsequent comment, but I just wanted to make sure that people understand why I wrote in about this issue:
It is definitely about the use of "making a case"/"make their case" in such close proximity to each other.
Yeah, I’m kind of picky about that kind of thing!
RfP said,
December 5, 2022 @ 6:47 pm
Oops! I guess my last sentence immediately above this should read more like “I’m rather selective about that kind of repetition.”
RFP said,
December 5, 2022 @ 10:41 pm
While bearing in mind the necessity for repetition in cases where exactitude is required—such as in technical writing—I do have an aversion to repetition, and I think it's related to the figures of rhetoric, as Mark referred to here:
People have put a lot of thought into these devices over the years, and some of these figures might be thought of as anti-patterns, such as syllepsis/zeugma, in which “a verb, expressed but once, lacks grammatical congruence with at least one subject with which it is understood” (Definitions from Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language, by Sister Miriam Joseph). For example, “He lost his mind and his car keys.”
This is an example in which a repetition is spuriously omitted—unless the author is using it for some kind of special effect, which is often how hypallage (in which “the application of words is perverted and sometimes made absurd”) is employed:
I believe that the avoidance of repetition, as an (unnamed?) anti-pattern, might possibly derive from the perceived negative effects of doing this when you aren’t trying to. Because repetition when not done for effect (or when carried to extremes) can be distracting. For example, there’s a name for alliteration that has gone too far: Paroemion. If you’re using it for comic effect, that might be okay, but otherwise…
Also, as Ursula K. Le Guin has pointed out, words “have, along with a semiotic usage, a symbolic or metaphoric usage. (They also have a sound—a fact the linguistic positivists take no interest in. A sentence or paragraph is like a chord or harmonic sequence in music: its meaning may be more clearly understood by the attentive ear, even though it is read in silence, than by the attentive intellect.)”
Unplanned repetition can affect the sound or rhythm of a sentence in a not necessarily pleasant way.
And the way we distinguish “bad re-use from good re-use” rests with the eyes—and ears—of the beholder. In other words, it’s a matter of taste, which is—I guess, I suppose, I hope (anaphora)—subject to analysis by literary critics, the buying public, and rhetoricians.
Along those lines, have you noticed that you just can’t go to a rock concert these days where the musicians still know how to destroy their amplifiers and set their guitars on fire? What’s the world coming to???
RfP said,
December 5, 2022 @ 10:51 pm
Finally, brief responses to some of the other comments above:
@David Morris
I know, right?
And in some situations, one might ignore these words, while paying close attention to repeating one or more of them in others, using the figures of rhetoric mentioned above (of which there are many).
@Hans Adler:
I’m not sure whether you might think that Sister Miriam does this, but I have found her book to be very helpful in understanding these issues. However, even I, who am highly motivated, find her work to be pretty daunting—and I can agree that it would be great if more popular books about this were available, whether in English or German!
@Julian
Churchill’s original quote uses anaphora, and very effectively!
And yes, someday I do hope to stop agonizing—after I convince that damn painter friend of mine that there’s no possible way they could need four shades of Cerulean!
Chester Draws said,
December 6, 2022 @ 2:20 am
I second Andreas that Swedes don't seem to be bothered. As a native speaker of English, I found the repetition in Swedish quite difficult — it made everyone seem lazy writers.
From French and Russian I have found it difficult to reconcile the repetition in the original into a decent translation. I'm doing historical works, so aim primarily for accuracy, not style. But it is just ugly to repeat words time and again.
Philip Anderson said,
December 6, 2022 @ 8:25 am
@Philip Taylor
That was a deliberate choice of word. While The Times presents itself as British, I see it as essentially English. Its focus is England, or England plus, and its journalists appear mostly English, with a handful of (unionist) Scots and Americans. Although more people now call themselves British than English, that’s essentially an English phenomenon – in Wales, Welsh is more popular (The Times, typically, only gave figures for “England and Wales”, a statistical entity not a country, excluding Scotland).
Bloix said,
December 6, 2022 @ 8:42 am
David Marjanović, Sven-
As a recreational cyclist who pays some attention to pro racing, I've been struck by the way sportswriters will use "the Belgian" or "the Italian" to avoid repeating a rider's name:
"The time trial is not mandatory and Van Aert was already not signed up for that competition. The race against the clock, which the Belgian won in both 2019 and 2020, didn’t fit into his pre-Tour schedule…"
And this is from an article about the Belgian national championships – ALL the riders are Belgian! (also notice the use of "race against the clock," to avoid repeating "time trial.")
languagehat said,
December 6, 2022 @ 8:54 am
From French and Russian I have found it difficult to reconcile the repetition in the original into a decent translation. I'm doing historical works, so aim primarily for accuracy, not style. But it is just ugly to repeat words time and again.
I have exactly the opposite complaint: it drives me wild that literary translators insist on variation when the original author has effectively used repetition for stylistic effect. (I wrote about this with regard to Tolstoy, but I've seen it a lot.) Repetition can, of course, be "ugly," as can anything else when used badly, but there is nothing wrong with it in and of itself, and an ideology that says there is is foolish.
Ralph J Hickok said,
December 6, 2022 @ 11:50 am
Those who are desperate to avoid repeating words often fall into the "elongated yellow fruit" trap.
https://englishforjournalists.journalism.cuny.edu/2013/11/25/elongated-yellow-fruit-and-fluffy-white-stuff/
Viseguy said,
December 6, 2022 @ 7:19 pm
Back in the '80s, I wrote a script that flagged repeating words in my written work. It was somewhat useful, though not often enough to prevent its falling into desuetude. I just ran it against the opening paragraph of Moby-Dick; it unhelpfully flagged all the whenevers that anchor the paragraph's characteristically biblical rhythms. In my defense, the script allows skip words; by eliminating them from the analysis, you could eventually get to a sometimes-actually-useful result. The takeaway was that the amount of repetition a word will bear depends on how ordinary/utilitarian-vs.-unusual/sesquipedalian the word is. Melville's whenevers, littles and myselfss easily escape unwanted attention. Using desuetude twice in the same paragraph (or chapter, or book) probably would not. (Mentions don't count, of course.)
Chester Draws said,
December 6, 2022 @ 10:38 pm
Repetition can, of course, be "ugly," as can anything else when used badly, but there is nothing wrong with it in and of itself, and an ideology that says there is is foolish.
You may think that, but if you write/translate a 200+ page book into English and keep using the same word over and over again, then your editor is likely to disagree.
When I translate I don't change the conventions of English. But it does come up against the features of the original.
So when a memoirs of an artillerist uses "cannon" a many dozens of times, there is an issue.
Shoe said,
December 7, 2022 @ 4:28 am
David Marjanović writes "German in particular cares about this (non-repetition) to a comical extent." This is certainly my experience too. A recent article about wild pigs invading the streets of Rome switched back and forth between Wildschweine, Borstentiere (literally "bristly animals") and Paarhufer ("ungulates").
languagehat said,
December 7, 2022 @ 8:54 am
You may think that, but if you write/translate a 200+ page book into English and keep using the same word over and over again, then your editor is likely to disagree.
You think you're providing a counterexample to what I said, but you're not. I did not say "Repetition is always good," I said "there is nothing wrong with it in and of itself," and that is clearly true. If "your editor" thinks there is, and no words should ever be repeated, then that editor is a fool and should not be allowed around actual texts. If repeated words hurt the text, the repetition should be eliminated; if not, not.
Bloix said,
December 7, 2022 @ 9:32 am
Ralph J Hickok-
Today's Washington Post:
DC winter outlook: Another lousy season for snow fans.
For the sixth time in seven years, we expect below-average amounts of the white stuff to fall in the nation's capital.
(The jocular tone is usual for the Post's weather coverage.)
RfP said,
December 7, 2022 @ 12:14 pm
The issues people are raising about translation really hit home for me.
When I was in college, I did a short stint as a volunteer translator of primarily news articles, often from newspapers of record, such as Le Monde (France) or Dagens Nyheter (Sweden).
Although I try to cut myself at least some slack, in that this was mostly about factual content—as opposed to opinion—and I have to chalk up at least some of my stance to youthful ignorance (and arrogance), I mostly just cringe at the way I seemed to envision myself as working at the rewrite desk of, say, the New York Times, ferreting out the actual content from the work of lowly provincial scribes, or stringers from Podunk.
When I was in high school, one of our French textbooks contained a lesson entitled “Traducteur, Traître” (“Translator, Traitor,” from the Italian expression “Traduttore, Traditore”).
Indeed.
Jerry Packard said,
December 7, 2022 @ 12:15 pm
I’ve often noticed that the reuse constraint does not seem so ironclad in Chinese. I don’t have any examples at my fingertips but Chinese often intentionally uses parallelism in syntax and repetition in lexical usage as a stylistic tool in writing.
RfP said,
December 7, 2022 @ 1:10 pm
@Jerry Packard
As does English.
The three main things I got from this thread are:
A realization of the likelihood that the aversion to unplanned repetition is somehow related to the same phenomena that were behind the development of the figures of rhetoric
A deeper understanding of the importance of these rhetorical devices for good writing
A heightened wish that these kinds of issues were a bigger part of contemporary discourse about writing (and speech!), including its linguistic dimensions
In addition to Miriam Joseph’s Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language, Marshall McLuhan’s The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time has provided me with, among other things, a keen appreciation of the way that the foundations of Modern English were laid in the context of an amazing stylistic renascence.
A heightened creative interest in this aspect of the writings and declamations of classical antiquity seems to have been a major spur to that flowering.
Michael Watts said,
December 7, 2022 @ 2:44 pm
On the matter of English style, I definitely also absorbed the idea that repeating the same word was bad style. I assume this is either taught explicitly in American curricula, or emphasized very forcefully without technically being a curriculum item.
On the matter of translation of repetitive or variable original material…
I obtained Moss Roberts' translation of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and I was immensely disappointed to read in the foreword that the characters are referred to, in the original, by a very great variety of names and epithets, but that the translation was doing me a favor by replacing all of these with a single standardized name for each character. That is the opposite of what I want. If you want to help me keep track of who is who, footnote the epithets or provide a table of dramatis personae. Don't massacre the original text.
JPL said,
December 7, 2022 @ 8:46 pm
@RfP:
I happened to notice the following sentence yesterday in the internet record of text-producing acts:
"The patina of pseudo-rigor, with its array of models, vast historical generalizations that touch down on disparate, specialist-appealing episodes appeals to a sort of intellectual conspicuous consumption. (Look at the clever stuff I’m into!)"
(In case the person who wrote this sentence happens to read this comment, I'm sorry: I'm not making any judgments about writing quality; I'm only interested in the example of a linguistic phenomenon.)
I'm wondering if it's this type of repetition (referring in this case to the repetition of the lexeme 'appeal') that particularly bugs you, where, as opposed to the case where the referents of two nearby instances of a single expression are identical, here the referents of the two instances of the single lexeme are different in a significant way. Would you feel, if you caught yourself producing something like the above, that at least one of these situations, if not both, could be described more accurately by another expression, allowing the recognition of a relevant difference? In the above example, it's not quite clear what two situations of "appealing" are being referred to here, but it's clear that they are distinct. (Author appealing to specialist knowledge as premise in argument vs. appeal of a style of presentation to the author's vanity?) I'm guessing that your "obsessive compunction" wrt repetition does not apply to all such cases, but mainly to particular identifiable types.
"On a related note", as they say in the media, how do you feel about equivocation, which can result in a fallacious argument if the repeated lexeme with different senses involves an inference valid under the one sense, but invalid under the different sense?
Colin Danby said,
December 8, 2022 @ 3:06 am
Robert Alter's intro to his translation of Genesis discusses the role of repetition in the original text, writing (xxvi) that "A suitable English version should avoid at all costs the modern abomination of elegant synonymous variation, for the literary prose of the Bible turns everywhere on significant repetition, not variation."
Vincent Chen said,
December 8, 2022 @ 5:04 am
@Jerry Packard
>> Chinese often intentionally uses parallelism in syntax and repetition in lexical usage as a stylistic tool in writing.
I agree that syntactic parallelism does have a significant aesthetic value in Sinitic languages, but I wonder if that really equals repeating the exact same characters.
One thing that came to me was the aversion toward piling up “de 的” in the same sentence, especially among the educated circles. When I was an undergrad history major in Taiwan, professors instructed us to avoid using two 的 in one sentence at all costs. Of course, the educated might have had a strong feeling about it simply because the litterateur Yu Kwang-chung saw the abuse of 的 as a symptom of how English has corrupted Chinese. (See, for example, his “怎樣改進英式中文？──論中文的常態與變態.”)
Some professors apply this rule to all characters, a practice that is admittedly observed by fewer people, though. But I was indeed since elementary school taught to avoid repetitions by using synonyms, even when they do not occur in the same sentence. I didn’t notice my internalization of these suggestions until my PhD advisor (in the US) pointed out the overuse of synonyms in my English writing.
Taylor, Philip said,
December 8, 2022 @ 11:30 am
I cannot help but wonder how much longer Matthew 1, verses 2 to 16, might have been had the translator(s) sought to eliminate all but one instance of "begat" —
Andrew Usher said,
December 8, 2022 @ 10:43 pm
Shorter, if he was sensible.
"Abraham begat Isaac; Isaac Jacob; Jacob, Judas and his brethren; … and Jacob Joseph, the husband of Mary …"
No less readable, I would say.
k_over_hbarc at yahoo dot com
RfP said,
December 9, 2022 @ 6:04 pm
@JPL
The patina of pseudo-rigor, with its array of models, vast historical generalizations that touch down on disparate, specialist-appealing episodes appeals to a sort of intellectual conspicuous consumption. (Look at the clever stuff I’m into!)"
…
Would you feel, if you caught yourself producing something like the above, that at least one of these situations, if not both, could be described more accurately by another expression, allowing the recognition of a relevant difference? … I'm guessing that your "obsessive compunction" wrt repetition does not apply to all such cases, but mainly to particular identifiable types.
I would definitely try to recast the sentence with something that was at least as accurate, but could possibly come up with something that was more accurate—and I would try to do so.
And yes, my “obsessive compunction” is fundamentally stylistic, but when accuracy or comprehension is at stake (as in the case of technical writing, for example) I am for repetition above style.
Also, I made one or more attempts at humor above, including this:
And the point of that—which lies somewhere between “there’s no accounting for taste” on the one hand, and some combination of sic transit gloria mundi and “tastes change,” on the other—is that styles come and go, and some people like a certain style for a while and then change their opinion about it. So I personally am “rabid” about certain stylistic issues at the moment, but I don’t think there’s a Platonic ideal to strive for in that context.
I’m all for rigor!
If my argument is fundamentally sound, but my wording is ambiguous—and especially if the wording is specious—I’m going to rewrite it until the merit of the argument is in accordance with the merit of the position I’m holding.
RfP said,
December 9, 2022 @ 6:05 pm
The following part of my previous comment was supposed to be a blockquote:
Jonathan Smith said,
December 9, 2022 @ 6:22 pm
Bad reuse is of course bad because it sounds like you meant it. When I read the opening of the supposed first draft of On the Road,
I first met Neal not long after my father died…I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about except that it really had something to do with my father's death and my awful feeling that everything was dead.
..I couldn't believe he had so fucked over the first lines upon rewriting
I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead.
in which, what is "dead" doing, the repetition was the point I thought
Viseguy said,
December 9, 2022 @ 6:44 pm
@Andrew Usher: "Shorter, if he was sensible. / 'Abraham begat Isaac; Isaac Jacob; …' / No less readable, I would say."
Even more sensible:
Matthew 1:2: "See figure 1.2.1 (family tree) [verses 3-16 intentionally left blank]."
But then Western Civilization would have been deprived of all the jokes that those begats begat.
RfP said,
December 10, 2022 @ 4:18 pm
Sandman author Neil Gaiman just tweeted to let a concerned fan know that Sandman Season 2 is definitely going to appear on Netflix.
As he put it, "Whatever behind the scenes wrangling and negotiating needed to happen to make this a reality has already occurred."
Note that he did not state that whatever needed to happen to make this happen has already happened…
https://twitter.com/neilhimself/status/1601655214523977728?s=20&t=WUSh6BCn3gTHR6I05XsS3w
Anonymous said,
December 18, 2022 @ 11:57 am
I'm no English major, but sometimes even in normal prose (not technical/legal writing), it is helpful to have a very clear parallel structure. Rather than fruiting things up with a lot of flowery synonyms or changes in sentence structure (purely to avoid repetition). Not always. It's a feel thing. But I have seen the "avoid repetition" types get too militant. And need to be put down.