Tautology

I was just reading an article in The Guardian about spurious concerns over the decline in the English language. It quotes the British broadcaster John Humphrys who complains about instances of tautology such as these:

• future plans
• past history
• live survivors
• safe havens

In each case, the adjective is redundant: history is about the past, so there is no need to add 'past'; if survivors are not alive, they are not survivors; etc. My own favourite is 'free gift' — if gifts are not free, then they are not gifts.

Some examples I previously found in the Borneo Bulletin include:

• a good facilitator and enabler for the market
• enhance and upgrade my skills
• determine and evaluate the impact

However, is it true that English is getting increasingly flabby, embellished by unnecessary extra words, thereby losing its compact crispness in conveying information efficiently? Or have we always had tautology? And is it true that Brunei English exhibits this tendency even more than other varieties of English, perhaps influenced by the rhetorical style of Malay?

I always recommend that students avoid tautology and eschew phrases such as 'analyse and investigate'. It is always important to think about one's writing and endeavour to improve it; but I'm not sure that English is getting sloppier. We have always had good writers and bad writers, and it is my job as a teacher to encourage my students to become good writers. But I don't believe that the overall standard of writing is deteriorating.

crash us out

I just read a UK news report in The Guardian in which there was a quote from Jo Swinson, the leader of the Liberal Democrats:

Boris Johnson’s shrinking majority makes it clear that he has no mandate to crash us out of the EU.

'crash us out'? To me, 'crash out' is an intransitive verb, so it cannot have an object such as 'us'. In the COCA corpus, there are 17 tokens of 'crash out', but none of 'crash us out'.

If one of my students were to write 'crash us out', I would mark it as an error; but seeing as it was produced by the leader of one of the main political parties in the UK, instead we might regard it as an indication of the ways that English is changing, even if this change is not yet reflected in a corpus such as COCA.

This is, of course, problematic: people in the UK have innovative usage, reflecting the ways the language is changing; but similar usage in places such as Brunei is treated as an error. Maybe we need to be more tolerant of all innovative usage, wherever it occurs.