1777: Pleonasm Oct 26, 2019

Pleonasm—essentially linguistic redundancy—can exist for many reasons. Sometimes it is just idiomatic, like French "Qu'est-ce que c'est?" meaning 'what's that?" but literally meaning "what is it that it is?", but in some languages it has an a grammatical function. In German, "die alten Männer sprechen" (the old men are talking) features a plural marker in every word of this sentence even though only using a plural noun would suffice; anything else would be ungrammatical in German.
Support Word Facts on patreon.com/wordfacts