I opened my radio show to listeners’ biggest peeves. The phone lines flooded

Can you over-exaggerate? Too much by nature, can hype turn hyper? From Latin, exaggerate means “above the pile”, heaping more onto the heap. You see the sense reflected in Philip Stubbes’ 1583 pamphlet Anatomy of Abuses: “With their flipping and flapping up and down in the dirt, they exaggerate a mountain out of a mire.” From molehill to mountain, sure, but can you go from mountain to mega-mountain?

Just one query to land last week after opening the radio lines to listeners, seeking their language muddles, their peeves and observations. My cohost was Kate Burridge, Professor of Linguistics at Monash University. We’d allocated 25 minutes to the forum, though 24 hours would never have been enough. Grammar and slang. Malapropism and Americanism. Every suspect joined the line-up, with tautology leading the charge.

Obvious stuff first, like 3am in the morning, or solo meal for one. Free gift and added bonus. Question: if you pre-book a ticket in advance, are you committing a double or triple tautology? As for honest truth, the actuality of factuality might be handy in 2025 to offset the “truthiness” of fake news.

Subtler examples followed, like over-exaggerate or forward planning, end result and please RSVP. A technical no-no, thanks to the French, where RSVP denotes “répondez s’il vous plaît” – so perhaps we are dealing with a non-non. Literally, the phrase means “respond if it pleases you”, making your extra please well-bred, but surplus. We call this RAS Syndrome, or Redundant Acronym Syndrome Syndrome, implicit in RAT tests, PIN numbers, PDF formats, even DC Comics.

If you pre-book a ticket in advance, are you committing a double or triple tautology?

Lived experience was another gripe. Charlie in Carlton called the expression superfluous, but I disagreed. Imagine your GP is an expert in diabetes, as she’s helped a series of patients over her career. That is, she has experience in the condition, as opposed to the lived experience of a diabetic. Being across X differs from “living” X.

Away from double-ups, we visited Jacinta’s fruit bowl in Clifton Springs. A former English teacher, Jacinta put her grumble this way: “Let’s say I have a choice of an apple or an orange. But if I say two choices, then I’ve got an apple, an orange, a banana and a pear. I really despise when people say two choices when it should be a choice – singular.”

Kate agreed; I didn’t. Explaining why English is forever restless. Okay or OK – which version is right? You have a choice. Or two choices as the case may be. Both spellings are fine, which is to say neither is wrong, though in Jacinta’s case, choice (not choices) is the only way to present any dilemma. Keeping in mind a dilemma can only be a choice of two, or two choices, assuming you interpret choice as a synonym of option, being my argument.