“…, and etcetera.”

Common English Blunders, Nouns, Redundancies

I heard this during a telephone call yesterday.

Problem:
The phrase is redundant.

Explanation:
The noun “etcetera” — abbreviated as “etc.” — means and other unspecified things of the same type or class.

So “and etcetera” literally means and and other unspecified things of the same type or class.

For fun, I searched Google for “and etcetera” (including the quotation marks) and found about 67,200 matches.

Suspecting that this was only part of the story, I then searched Google for “and etc.” (including the quotation marks) and found about 9,280,000 matches.

Combining the matches for the abbreviated and unabbreviated forms, that’s over 9.3 million matches for this redundant phrase!

Solution:
“…, etcetera.”