Redundancies

“Free Gift”

Adjectives, Common English Blunders, Nouns, Redundancies

I see and hear this phrase a lot.

Problem:
The adjective creates a redundancy.

Explanation:
The noun “gift” in this phrase means a thing or experience voluntarily given without any kind of reciprocal payment required or expected.

So the adjective “free” creates a redundancy when combined with the noun “gift”.

For fun, I searched Google for “free gift” (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about 9,110,000 matches.

Not all of these matches were what I was seeking. For example, Google returned “Free Gift-Giving Labels”, but this does not agree with the sense of the phrase “Free Gift”.

However, I am sure that many millions of the returned matches did agree with the sense of the phrase, which obviously makes this phrase a common English blunder.

Solution:
“Gift”

“Change of venue location”

Adjectives, Hyphens, Nouns, Redundancies

I saw this yesterday in a TV commercial.

Problem:
This phrase contains a redundancy.

Explanation:
“Change of venue location” appeared in Houston, Texas, in a television advertisement from Disney on Ice, an ice-skating theatrical performance company.

Disney put the phrase in the TV ad apparently because of Hurricane Ike’s impact on Houston.

If the phrase were approximately correct, then a hyphen should have been placed between “Change” and “of”, and another hyphen should have been placed between “of” and “venue”, so as to create a compound modifier of the noun “location”.

However, the noun “venue” and the noun “location” in modern parlance have come to mean the same thing, so this phrase contains a redundancy.

Beyond the redundancy, it is preferable to reserve the use of the noun “venue” to refer to the scene of a crime or to where a jury is convened.

This gives us the solution.

Solution:
“Change of location”

“Leader-led training”

Adjectives, Devolution toward Simpler, Redundancies

I have seen this in several announcements from one company.

Problem:
The adjective “leader-led” is self-redundant and does not tell you who is doing the leading.

Explanation:
Courses offered by companies before the advent of computers were called “corporate training” or simply “training”.

The advent of computers and authoring tools made “computer-based training” possible.

The advent of the Web and more authoring tools made “Web-based training” possible.

These two phrases forced writers and speakers to look for a special phrase to distinguish non-computer-based training from computer-based training and Web-based training, but “non-computer-based training” was too long and somewhat negative.

This resulted in the creation of the phrase “instructor-led training”.

Unfortunately, this phrase has deteriorated in some quarters into “leader-led training”, which says nothing about who is doing the leading of the training.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “instructor-led training” — 519,000 matches
  • “instructor-led courses” — 85,800 matches
  • “leader-led training” — 597 matches
  • “leader-led courses” — 410 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the meaningful “instructor-led” versus the meaningless “leader-led” by a ratio of 601-to-1, which is excellent.

However, this does not mean that “leader-led” as an adjective will not grow in popularity. I believe that the replacement of “instructor-led” with “leader-led” is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis.

It is simpler to write or say the two-syllable noun “leader” than it is to write or say the three-syllable noun “instructor”, and “leader” — not “instructor” — is alliterative with “led”.

Solution:
“Instructor-led training”