Why tautology can be irritating to discerning readers
What you need to know:
- Just after you have used the word ever, the two words “in history” become a complete waste because, in that context, “ever” and “in history” mean exactly the same thing.
- The idea that the victory was historic — namely, that it had never been done before — has already been expressed by the words best ever.
- Where you have described Eliud Kipchoge’s victory as the “best ever” in his category of Olympic sports, it is appallingly repetitive of you to go on to call it historic in the same grammatical breath.
As we have seen in this column again and again, tautology is the completely needless repetition of what one has already expressed in the same sentence in another or in other words. A usual example in our newspapers took place on page 3 of The Standard of Monday, August 22. A sub-editor wrote in a headline: “Kipchoge wins gold in Kenya’s best ever Olympics in history.”
Just after you have used the word ever, the two words “in history” become a complete waste because, in that context, “ever” and “in history” mean exactly the same thing. Let us reiterate this. The idea that the victory was historic — namely, that it had never been done before — has already been expressed by the words best ever.
A score can be described as “best ever” only if it was achieved for the first time — namely, “in history” — only if it was better than anything that another sportsman or woman had ever done. That is why to use both phrases (“best ever” and “in history”) in the same linguistic breath is to say the same thing twice.
It is to commit what we have repeatedly condemned here as tautology. For it stands to reason that a thing or action can be “best ever” only if, up to the relevant time, no other thing or action in its category had been equally good or better.
APPALLINGLY REPETITIVE
The point is this. From all Olympic and certain other international sporting meets, performances in every category are entered into an official record. That, I suppose, is why, whenever an athlete outperforms what is in such a record book in a particular sporting category, they say that he or she has broken the record.
That is to say that he or she has outperformed what is in the books. Moreover, where you have described Eliud Kipchoge’s victory as the “best ever” in his category of Olympic sports, it is appallingly repetitive of you to go on to call it historic in the same grammatical breath.
For, at a given time and place, to be “best ever” in the same category of sports (or any other field) is the same thing as to be historic. It is to make history. It is to enter the hall of records. It is to do what nobody else has ever done in a category of endeavours.
I do not know if this Kipchoge has any blood links with the inimitable Kipchoge Keino, the Kenyan whose performance in many track events astonished the world throughout the 1970s.
Moreover, I do not know whether the younger Kipchoge will follow in the nyayo of the nimble-footed track wizard of yore.
But I verily hope that the younger Kipchoge will even outperform his namesake and predecessor in the tradition of keeping Kenya very high up among the world’s greatest sporting nations ever since the Pelasgic (pre-Hellenic) Greeks — close blood and cultural relatives of East Africa’s present Kalenjin, Luo and Maasai — popularised such games at Thessaly and Corinth.