ArticlesDeep down I fear that one day, I will be outed.
Despite my best efforts to bleat reassurances that I believe that the English language is fluid and changing, and there is no point pretending that there is one correct way to speak it, some linguist is one day going to point at me and yell “Hey! Wait a minute! He’s not a descriptivist! He’s a damn prescriptivist! Get him!”
In the meantime, I am going to dispute a point I commonly hear from (other) English pedants, in an effort to continue my deception.
Let me start my deception by distracting you…
Say the word “can” out aloud. Now, say the word “can’t”.
Did those two words rhyme?
In some accents, they do – “can’t” is pronounced kant. In most, they don’t – “can’t” is pronounced kahnt
Why should the suffixed “t” affect the vowel sound? One argument is that it has evolved to emphasize the difference between the two words. Adding redundancy reduces the chance of mishearing the words.
Why do we need both of the words “is” and “are”? Are it really necessary?
A reason why the distinction may have evolved and survived is, again, to add redundancy to the language to help detect (and perhaps correct) misheard phrases.
So, our language and communication has evolved to add redundancy – in the words we select, the sounds we make, sentence structure and the repeating of ideas in a paragraph.
The result is bigger dictionaries and (at a first glance) inefficient speech – but it improves the overall transmission rate of communications in a noisy environment.
Now, consider some of the expressions most hated by English pedants: “ATM Machine” and “PIN Number”. These terms are clearly redundant; the initial acronym/initialism already incorporates the noun.
I defend the use of such terms. Where words might be unclear or ambiguous, adding such redundancy is a successful way of making oneself better understood. Being clear that you are talking about Automatic Teller Machines (and not any other ATM) and Personal Identification Number (and not a sharp sliver of metal) warrants the use of a redundant word here and there.
QED demonstrandum
Comment by Richard on January 3, 2007
Personally, I see these TLAs (or TLIs for the true pedants out there) as a sign that the language hasn’t grown up to give names to these systems. If there was a common name for an ATM, such as e-teller (am I coining a phrase here? Who knows), and for a PIN, such as passcode, then we wouldn’t have these unnecessarily ambiguous lumps of linguistic laziness thrust upon us all day, every day.
And regarding the supposed ambiguity of ‘ATM’, is there a single situation where you might be confused which of the many wikipedia definitions is correct?
And just to cap this rant off, the phrase ‘necessary redundancy’ from the title is not a tautology, as there are plenty of cases where redundancy is completely unnecessary. Do you have two mouses attached to your PC in case one breaks?
I shan’t, can’t and won’t admit I’m wrong on this one… because I’m not 😉
Comment by Julian on January 3, 2007
Richard,
I am interested why you feel that “ATM” isn’t just as much a first-class citizen as a linguistic symbol (lexeme??) as “e-teller”. Doesn’t the “acronym” serve equally well as a noun/adjective as a whole new word?
Ambiguous situation?
“Did you manage to check your bank balance?”
“I had a hard time. The ATM was down.”
“That’s a shame. So what did you do?”
“I gave up on trying to access their website over the unpopular network protocol, drove to the e-teller, and checked my balance there.”
Sorry, I probably should have spent some more time working on the title. Perhaps if it asked it “unnecessary redundancy” was a tautology, then I could argue that the rest of the article was demonstrating that the answer was no.
Comment by Aristotle Pagaltzis on January 4, 2007
In German, ATMs are just called what literally translates as “money machines.†Problem solved. :P
Anyway, I don’t think your observation and your conclusion have anything to do with one another. I seems to me that the expansion of the last letter has little to do with disambiguation, and it’s usually unnecessary for that purpose. Your example, you’ll have to admit, is quite stilted – how many people are aware that A.T.M. can stand for anything other than the an Automated Teller Machine?
Rather, there is, I think, simply an aversion to using unpronouncable initialisms as nouns – people prefer to turn them into adjectives. Of course, you need a noun to talk about, so people use a broad term that describes the object they refer to and attach the initialism as an adjective to qualify the noun. It only just so happens that the chosen noun is often redundant with the expansion of the last letter of the initialism.
Eg. noone ever talks about a TFT transistor screen, just a TFT screen. Here, the initialism is not pronouncable, but its expansion is not itself the type of object usually referred to, and so there is no redundancy between the expansion of its last letter and the noun that follows.
Equally, noone talks about RAM memory. They just say RAM. Here, we have a pronouncable acronym, and so people don’t try to use it as an adjective.
PIN is a special case because the pronounciation overlaps with a word that has a completely different meaning. There, indeed, disambiguation is necessary. But it’s not disambiguation between various possible expansions of P.I.N.; it’s disambiguation between pin and PIN.
In this context, an old German custom (that is mostly lost now) is interesting. In times past, Germans would not hack down words to a single letter before mashing those bloody stumps together to form an initialism, but would rather form a pronoucable compound out of clipped forms of the words. An example that is still in common use is “Juso†standing for “Jungsozialist.â€
In that way, an Automated Teller Machine might have been called an “autema†or “autelma.†Likewise a Personal Identification Number might have called a “perinum.â€
Assuming that people were comfortable being identified by something that’s just an “e†away from their crotch.
Comment by Sunny Kalsi on January 4, 2007
Wow, you guys have put together the points I was going to make. I think Richard’s point about TLAs being not as good as real words is valid, and Aristotle shows why. The only thing I have left to say is:
In Japan they contract many words to make one, like “Persacon” for “Personal Computer”… etc. This also happens to Japanese words. That’s one thing that I like about Japanese (even though it’s not really a formal part of the language). However, this would cause a lot of homonyms (maybe that’s why there’s so many homonyms in Japanese already). I believe a number of constructed languages have made some effort to make compound words guaranteed unique, but it involves a fairly rigid structure to naming, adjectives, etc. and the rules are complicated.
Comment by Warsaw Will on February 20, 2011
I think that some people simply have to have something to moan about, and this seems to be the latest fad. To me ‘PIN’ on its own, if not exactly ambiguous, does sound a bit strange. Incidentally in the UK we don’t have the ATM problem, as they are universally called ‘cash machines’, like the German example above.
But basically I just can’t get worked up about silly things like this; life’s too short. I’ve just been on a forum where one answer to ‘Why do people say PIN number and ATM machine?’ was ‘Because they’re idiots … not like us!’ – which sort of begs the question – who are the real idiots? Who was it that said that a little learning was a dangerous thing?