Six of one, half a dozen of the other

I’m a flip flop voter. It is gonna be tion cossing stuff for me. I can’t make out any real difference between the two big players in Nu Zulun’s election.

National and John Key talk about the literacy and numeracy crisis and seem to suggest that a child saying the alphabet backwards is the key to what good literacy is all about. I can understand counting backwards as a key skill in numeracy setting one up for subtraction and the like. But the alphabet backwards?? I gotta confess I can’t do it at anything but a dawdle.

I do have a friend that can give pi to 100 hundred decimal places. She did it at the dinner table as I tucked into a medium rare.

So talking about maths, how do we differentiate the two parties? Yes, Helen is arrogant and John’s a nice guy …. But neither seems to integrate their policies into a cohesive whole.

From Helen it is all derision and uglification. From John its distraction and sedition (by one M. McCully).

I think I’ll stick with probability theory and toss a coin.

There I've said it again .....

Here’s what the big guy Henry (Hank)Paulson from the US Treasury had to say about the big bailout:

“We are taking unprecedented measures that we never thought would be necessary”

Now this is your classic case of redundancy. It borders on the tautological. Doesn’t he know what unprecedented means?

Due to unforseen circumstances that we didn’t know were going to happen.

It was an incomprehensible situation that we could not understand.

It was an unbelievable outcome that I did not think was possible.

Yet folks there is a place for redundancy. In the above Paulson case, it is the typical political rhetoric of using tautology for added impact.

Try a few of these:
Free gift
Big Calamity
Tiny microorganism
Added bonus
Past regrets
Future plans
Unconfirmed rumour
Final result
False pretences

The reality is, with the election campaign underway, we are, at the end of the day, when all is said and done, in for a great and substantial amount of what is know as, for better or worse, as loggorhea.

One type of redundancy is somewhat hidden away were you can’t see it. It is called the RAS syndrome or the Redundant Acronym Sydrome syndrome. A classic example is the ASB Bank (Auckland Savings Bank Bank), or AUT University (may I say a fine University!). However, to be fair, the acronym ASB or AUT has become a brand and thus is no longer to be unpacked as in olden days happy golden days of yore. Mind you not all acronyms would work - MIT University? SIT University?

Ah well lets bung on those Yes Minster DVDs and really catch bucket load of needless redundancy.