RAS syndrome

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"ATM machine" is a common example of RAS syndrome ATM Machine RAS Syndrome sign.jpg
"ATM machine" is a common example of RAS syndrome

RAS syndrome, where RAS stands for redundant acronym syndrome (making the phrase "RAS syndrome" autological) is the redundant use of one or more of the words that make up an acronym in conjunction with the abbreviated form. This means, in effect, repeating one or more words from the acronym. For example: PIN number (expanding to personal identification number number) and ATM machine (expanding to automated teller machine machine).

Contents

The term RAS syndrome was coined in 2001 in a light-hearted column in New Scientist . [1] [2] [3]

A person is said to "suffer" from RAS syndrome when they redundantly use one or more of the words that make up an acronym or initialism with the abbreviation itself. Usage commentators consider such redundant acronyms poor style that is best avoided in writing, especially in a formal context, though they are common in speech. [4] The degree to which there is a need to avoid pleonasms such as redundant acronyms depends on one's balance point of prescriptivism (ideas about how language should be used) versus descriptivism (the realities of how natural language is used). [5] For writing intended to persuade, impress, or avoid criticism, many usage guides advise writers to avoid pleonasm as much as possible, not because such usage is always wrong, but rather because most of one's audience may believe that it is always wrong. [6]

Linguistics

Although there are many instances in editing where removal of redundancy improves clarity, [7] the pure-logic ideal of zero redundancy is seldom maintained in human languages. Bill Bryson says: "Not all repetition is bad. It can be used for effect ..., or for clarity, or in deference to idiom. 'OPEC countries', 'SALT talks' and 'HIV virus' are all technically redundant because the second word is already contained in the preceding abbreviation, but only the ultra-finicky would deplore them. Similarly, in 'Wipe that smile off your face' the last two words are tautological—there is no other place a smile could be—but the sentence would not stand without them." [7]

A limited amount of redundancy can improve the effectiveness of communication, either for the whole readership or at least to offer help to those readers who need it. A phonetic example of that principle is the need for spelling alphabets in radiotelephony. Some instances of RAS syndrome can be viewed as syntactic examples of the principle. The redundancy may help the listener by providing context and decreasing the "alphabet soup quotient" (the cryptic overabundance of abbreviations and acronyms) of the communication.

Acronyms from foreign languages are often treated as unanalyzed morphemes when they are not translated. For example, in French, "le protocole IP" (the Internet Protocol protocol) is often used, and in English "please RSVP" (roughly "please respond please") is very common. [4] [8] This occurs for the same linguistic reasons that cause many toponyms to be tautological. The tautology is not parsed by the mind in most instances of real-world use (in many cases because the foreign word's meaning is not known anyway; in others simply because the usage is idiomatic).

Examples

Examples of RAS phrases include:

See also

Related Research Articles

An abbreviation is a shortened form of a word or phrase, by any method including shortening, contraction, initialism or crasis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet slang</span> Slang languages used by different people on the Internet

Internet slang is a non-standard or unofficial form of language used by people on the Internet to communicate to one another. An example of Internet slang is "lol" meaning "laugh out loud." Since Internet slang is constantly changing, it is difficult to provide a standardized definition. However, it can be understood to be any type of slang that Internet users have popularized, and in many cases, have coined. Such terms often originate with the purpose of saving keystrokes or to compensate for small character limits. Many people use the same abbreviations in texting, instant messaging, and social networking websites. Acronyms, keyboard symbols, and abbreviations are common types of Internet slang. New dialects of slang, such as leet or Lolspeak, develop as ingroup Internet memes rather than time savers. Many people also use Internet slang in face-to-face, real life communication.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Self-reference</span> Sentence, idea or formula that refers to itself

Self-reference is a concept that involves referring to oneself or one's own attributes, characteristics, or actions. It can occur in language, logic, mathematics, philosophy, and other fields.

A recursive acronym is an acronym that refers to itself, and appears most frequently in computer programming. The term was first used in print in 1979 in Douglas Hofstadter's book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, in which Hofstadter invents the acronym GOD, meaning "GOD Over Djinn", to help explain infinite series, and describes it as a recursive acronym. Other references followed, however the concept was used as early as 1968 in John Brunner's science fiction novel Stand on Zanzibar. In the story, the acronym EPT later morphed into "Eptification for Particular Task".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Figure of speech</span> Change of the expected pattern of words

A figure of speech or rhetorical figure is a word or phrase that intentionally deviates from straightforward language use or literal meaning to produce a rhetorical or intensified effect. In the distinction between literal and figurative language, figures of speech constitute the latter. Figures of speech are traditionally classified into schemes, which vary the ordinary sequence of words, and tropes, where words carry a meaning other than what they ordinarily signify.

Elegant variation is the use of synonyms to avoid repetition or add variety. The term was introduced in 1906 by H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler in The King's English. In their meaning of the term, they focus particularly on instances when the word being avoided is a noun or its pronoun. Pronouns are themselves variations intended to avoid awkward repetition, and variations are so often not necessary, that they should be used only when needed. The Fowlers recommend that "variations should take place only when there is some awkwardness, such as ambiguity or noticeable monotony, in the word avoided".

Pleonasm is redundancy in linguistic expression, such as in "black darkness," "burning fire," "the man he said," or "vibrating with motion." It is a manifestation of tautology by traditional rhetorical criteria. Pleonasm may also be used for emphasis, or because the phrase has become established in a certain form. Tautology and pleonasm are not consistently differentiated in literature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Self-referential humor</span> Humor that alludes to itself

Self-referential humor, also known as self-reflexive humor, self-aware humor, or meta humor, is a type of comedic expression that—either directed toward some other subject, or openly directed toward itself—is self-referential in some way, intentionally alluding to the very person who is expressing the humor in a comedic fashion, or to some specific aspect of that same comedic expression. Here, meta is used to describe that the joke explicitly talks about other jokes, a usage similar to the words metadata, metatheatrics and metafiction. Self-referential humor expressed discreetly and surrealistically is a form of bathos. In general, self-referential humor often uses hypocrisy, oxymoron, or paradox to create a contradictory or otherwise absurd situation that is humorous to the audience.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Acronym</span> Abbreviation consisting of initial letters of a phrase

An acronym is a type of abbreviation consisting of a phrase whose only pronounced elements are the initial letters or initial sounds of words inside that phrase. Acronyms are often spelled with the initial letter of each word in all caps with no punctuation.

In linguistics, a redundancy is information that is expressed more than once.

Reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS), also known as reliability, availability, and maintainability (RAM), is a computer hardware engineering term involving reliability engineering, high availability, and serviceability design. The phrase was originally used by IBM as a term to describe the robustness of their mainframe computers.

In mathematical logic, a tautology is a formula that is true regardless of the interpretation of its component terms, with only the logical constants having a fixed meaning. For example, a formula that states, "the ball is green or the ball is not green," is always true, regardless of what a ball is and regardless of its colour. Tautology is usually, though not always, used to refer to valid formulas of propositional logic.

Scientific terminology is the part of the language that is used by scientists in the context of their professional activities. While studying nature, scientists often encounter or create new material or immaterial objects and concepts and are compelled to name them. Many of those names are known only to professionals. However, due to popularization of science, they gradually become part of common languages. Several categories of scientific terminology can be distinguished.

Abbreviations are a common part of the Hebrew language, with many organizations, places, people and concepts known by their abbreviations.

In common usage and linguistics, concision is a communication principle of eliminating redundancy, generally achieved by using as few words as possible in a sentence while preserving its meaning. More generally, it is achieved through the omission of parts that impart information that was already given, that is obvious or that is irrelevant. Outside of linguistics, a message may be similarly "dense" in other forms of communication.

RSVP is an initialism derived from the French phrase "Répondez s'il vous plaît", meaning "Please respond", to require confirmation of an invitation. The initialism "RSVP" is no longer used much in France, where it is considered formal and old-fashioned. In France, it is now more common to use "Réponse attendue avant le ...", meaning "[Your] answer is expected before ...". In addition, the French initialism "SVP" is frequently used to represent "S'il vous plaît" ("Please").

Verbosity, or verboseness, is speech or writing that uses more words than necessary. The opposite of verbosity is succinctness.

In natural language processing, semantic compression is a process of compacting a lexicon used to build a textual document by reducing language heterogeneity, while maintaining text semantics. As a result, the same ideas can be represented using a smaller set of words.

In literary criticism and rhetoric, a tautology is a statement that repeats an idea using near-synonymous morphemes, words or phrases, effectively "saying the same thing twice". Tautology and pleonasm are not consistently differentiated in literature. Like pleonasm, tautology is often considered a fault of style when unintentional. Intentional repetition may emphasize a thought or help the listener or reader understand a point. Sometimes logical tautologies like "Boys will be boys" are conflated with language tautologies, but a language tautology is not inherently true, while a logical tautology always is.

References

  1. ↑ Clothier, Gary (November 8, 2006). "Ask Mr. Know-It-All". The York Dispatch.
  2. ↑ Newman, Stanley (December 20, 2008). "Sushi by any other name". Windsor Star. p. G4. Archived from the original on May 3, 2012.
  3. ↑ "Feedback" (fee required). New Scientist . No. 2285. April 7, 2001. p. 108. Archived from the original on June 21, 2015. Retrieved December 8, 2006.
  4. 1 2 Garner, Bryan A. (2000) The Oxford Dictionary of American Usage and Style. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
  5. ↑ Milroy, James; Milroy, Lesley (1999). Authority in Language: Investigating Standard English. Psychology Press. ISBN   978-0-415-17412-1.
  6. ↑ Kasperavičienė, Ramunė (December 12, 2011). "On Semantic Pleonasms in English and their Translation in Lithuanian". Studies About Languages (19): 21–26. doi: 10.5755/j01.sal.0.19.942 . ISSN   2029-7203.
  7. 1 2 Bryson, Bill (2002). Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words. Crown. ISBN   0-7679-1043-5.
  8. ↑ "LINGUIST List 4.532: Last Posting: Acronyms". Linguistlist.org. July 7, 1993. Archived from the original on September 24, 2018. Retrieved May 22, 2009.
  9. ↑ "Why The DC Comics Name Actually Makes No Sense". Screen Rant. October 5, 2019. Archived from the original on April 28, 2021. Retrieved April 28, 2021.
  10. ↑ "What Does DC Comics Stand For?". Screen Rant. May 7, 2020. Archived from the original on April 29, 2021. Retrieved April 29, 2021.
  11. ↑ Nordquist, Richard. "RAS Syndrome: Redundant Acronym Syndrome Syndrome". ThoughtCo. Archived from the original on November 11, 2020. Retrieved November 15, 2019.
  12. ↑ Brians, Paul. "LCD display". Common Errors in English Usage. Archived from the original on March 12, 2017. Retrieved May 1, 2012.
  13. ↑ Memmott, Mark (January 6, 2015). "Do You Suffer From RAS Syndrome?". NPR.org. Archived from the original on October 6, 2020. Retrieved November 15, 2019.
  14. ↑ "15 Redundant Words That Make You Sound Ignorant". rd.com. August 16, 2018. Archived from the original on August 2, 2020. Retrieved March 30, 2022.
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