“
Racist policy” says exactly what the problem is and where the problem is. “Institutional racism” and “structural racism” and “systemic racism” are redundant. Racism itself is institutional, structural, and systemic.
”
”
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
“
It [I'm leaving] wasn't really necessary to say, especially if you were already walking away. Almost redundant. And yet, there was a comfort in being no question, no room for doubt.
”
”
Sarah Dessen (The Moon and More)
“
I am going to marry you.”
“Aren’t you supposed to ask me first?” she inquired.
“I thought that would be redundant.”
“So you just assumed I would say yes.”
“Of course.”
Well how the hell was she supposed to argue with that, especially with him grinning down at her like that, and a happy sparkle in his vivid eyes? “You’re arrogant.”
“Hmm.” He shrugged as his hands stroked over her back. “And you love it.
”
”
Erica Stevens (Salvation (The Captive, #4))
“
By the fifth 'I'm sorry' for the same cause, it's better to just say, I meant to do it.
”
”
Anthony Liccione
“
Pervy and redundant, don't you think?" I asked the big gay cop, who wouldn't know a va-jay-jay if it bounced up to him and sang the "Star-Spangled Banner." (You ever notice that hardly anything besides the "Star-Spangled Banner" is spangled? There's no, like, the Raisin-Spangled Scone, or the Flea-Spangled Beagle. I'm just saying.)
--Being the Journal of Abby Normal
”
”
Christopher Moore (Bite Me (A Love Story, #3))
“
BE A LAWYER in a lawless time was like being a clown among the humorless: which was to say, either completely redundant or absolutely essential.
”
”
Salman Rushdie (Quichotte)
“
I come from the sort of family in which, at the age of ten, I was told I must always say hoi polloi, never "the hoi polloi," because hoi meant "the," and two "the's" were redundant -- indeed something only hoi polloi would say.
”
”
Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)
“
Not long ago, I advertised for perverse rules of grammar, along the lines of "Remember to never split an infinitive" and "The passive voice should never be used." The notion of making a mistake while laying down rules ("Thimk," "We Never Make Misteaks") is highly unoriginal, and it turns out that English teachers have been circulating lists of fumblerules for years. As owner of the world's largest collection, and with thanks to scores of readers, let me pass along a bunch of these never-say-neverisms:
* Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read.
* Don't use no double negatives.
* Use the semicolon properly, always use it where it is appropriate; and never where it isn't.
* Reserve the apostrophe for it's proper use and omit it when its not needed.
* Do not put statements in the negative form.
* Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
* No sentence fragments.
* Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
* Avoid commas, that are not necessary.
* If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
* A writer must not shift your point of view.
* Eschew dialect, irregardless.
* And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.
* Don't overuse exclamation marks!!!
* Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
* Writers should always hyphenate between syllables and avoid un-necessary hyph-ens.
* Write all adverbial forms correct.
* Don't use contractions in formal writing.
* Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
* It is incumbent on us to avoid archaisms.
* If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
* Steer clear of incorrect forms of verbs that have snuck in the language.
* Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixed metaphors.
* Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
* Never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
* Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
* If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, resist hyperbole.
* Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration.
* Don't string too many prepositional phrases together unless you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death.
* Always pick on the correct idiom.
* "Avoid overuse of 'quotation "marks."'"
* The adverb always follows the verb.
* Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives."
(New York Times, November 4, 1979; later also published in book form)
”
”
William Safire (Fumblerules: A Lighthearted Guide to Grammar and Good Usage)
“
Werewolves are not the subject of academe,” she said, “but you know what the professors would be saying if they were. ‘Monsters die out when the collective imagination no longer needs them. Species death like this is nothing more than a shift in the aggregate psychic agenda. In ages past the beast in man was hidden in the dark, disavowed. The transparency of modern history makes that impossible: We’ve seen ourselves in concentration camps, the gulags, the jungles, the killing fields, we’ve read ourselves in the annals of True Crime. Technology turned up the lights and now there’s no getting away from the fact: The beast is redundant. It’s been us all along.
”
”
Glen Duncan (The Last Werewolf (The Last Werewolf, #1))
“
The apologies, the true sign—that this was not the man you once knew, a man who would never have uttered that word to his son, sorry, and in English, no less. Not because he thought himself infallible, but because of his belief that a family should never have to say sorry, or please, or thank you, for that matter, these things being redundant, being contradictory to the parent-son relationship, needing to remain unstated always, these things being the invisible fabric of what a family is.
”
”
Charles Yu (Interior Chinatown)
“
We all look for strategies or techniques that will free us from the pain of relationships and the hard work good relationships demand. We hope that better planning, more effective communication, clear role definitions, conflict resolution strategies, gender studies, and personality typing--to name just a few -- will make the difference. There may be value in these things, but if they were all we needed, Jesus' life, death, and resurrection would be unnecessary or, at best, redundant.
Skills and techniques appeal to us because they promise that relational problems can be fixed by tweaking our behavior without altering the bent of our hearts. But the Bible says something very different. It says that Christ is the only real hope for relationships because only he can dig deep enough to address the core motivations and desires of our hearts.
Most dangerous aspect of your relationships is not your weakness, but your delusions of strength. Self-reliance is almost always a component of a bad relationship.
”
”
Paul David Tripp
“
To say I’ll miss you seems redundant. I’ve been missing you for years. People have called me heartless and they’re right. My heart resides with you and the only time I feel anything is when I’m in your presence. My greatest hope is that someday you will give me your heart again so I can finally feel complete.
”
”
Jill Prand (Watch Me Walk Away (Walking, #1))
“
Gratuitous redundancy makes prose difficult not just because readers have to duplicate the effort of figuring something out, but because they naturally assume that when a writer says two things she means two things, and fruitlessly search for the nonexistent second point.
”
”
Steven Pinker (The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century)
“
I was going to say 'my friend Stuart', but I suppose he's not a friend any more. I seem to have lost a number of friends in the last few years. I don't mean that I've fallen out with them, in any dramatic way. We've just decided not to stay in touch. And that's what it's been: a decision, a conscious decision, because it's not difficult to stay in touch with people nowadays, there are so many different ways of doing it. But as you get older, I think that some friendships start to feel increasingly redundant. You just find yourself asking, "What's the point?" And then you stop.
”
”
Jonathan Coe (The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim)
“
When you go to say hello to nature, put every redundant sound away, for nature is music, and that alone should suffice.
”
”
Michael Bassey Johnson (Song of a Nature Lover)
“
You can argue that it expresses a degree of difference between He closed the door and He slammed the door, and you’ll get no argument from me . . . . but what about context? What about all the enlightening (not to say emotionally moving) prose which came before He closed the door firmly? Shouldn’t this tell us how he closed the door? And if the foregoing prose does tell us, isn’t firmly an extra word? Isn’t it redundant? Someone out there is now accusing me of being tiresome and anal-retentive. I deny it. I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.
”
”
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
“
Nature likes to overinsure itself. Layers of redundancy are the central risk management property of natural systems. We humans have two kidneys (this may even include accountants), extra spare parts, and extra capacity in many, many things (say, lungs, neural system, arterial apparatus), while human design tends to be spare and inversely redundant, so to speak—we have a historical track record of engaging in debt, which is the opposite of redundancy (fifty thousand in extra cash in the bank or, better, under the mattress, is redundancy; owing the bank an equivalent amount, that is, debt, is the opposite of redundancy). Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens—usually.
”
”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder)
“
Mizzy has wandered into the garden. Carole looks contemplatively at him, says, "Lovely boy."
"My wife's insanely younger brother. He's one of those kids with too much potential, if you know what I mean."
"I know exactly what you mean."
Further details would be redundant. Peter knows the Potters' story: the pretty, unstoppable daughter who's tearing through her Harvard doctorate versus the older child, the son, who has, it seems, been undone by his good fortune; who at thirty-eight is still surfing and getting stoned by way of occupations, currently in Australia.
”
”
Michael Cunningham (By Nightfall)
“
What is that thing they say? Poetry is the most reviled and redundant art form, everyone rolls their eyes at it and takes the piss out of it. But the second that something shit happens in our lives, it’s the first recourse we have.
”
”
Dolly Alderton (Good Material)
“
Perhaps it is to fulfill this primal urge that runners and joggers get up every morning and pound the streets in cities all over the world. To feel the stirring of something primeval deep down in the pits of our bellies. To feel "a little bit wild." Running is not exactly fun. Running hurts. It takes effort. Ask any runner why he runs, and he will probably look at you with a wry smile and say, "I don't know." But something keeps us going. We may obsess about our PBs and mileage count, but these things alone are not enough to get us out running... What really drives us is something else, this need to feel human, to reach below the multitude of layers of roles and responsibilites that societ y has placed on us, down below the company name tags, and even the father, husband, and son, labels, to the pure, raw human being underneath. At such moments, our rational mind becomes redundant. We move from thought to feeling.
”
”
Adharanand Finn (Running with the Kenyans: Passion, Adventure, and the Secrets of the Fastest People on Earth)
“
Shut up!" He bellowed again, clearly very confused.
“Why do people say ‘shut up’? Shut what… My hand? My mouth? If you mean mouth than why did you add the ‘up’? You can’t shut your mouth down so it’s redundant. If you had just said ‘Shut’ I would have shut my mouth just the same. Actually, I probably wouldn't have, but that’s beside the point. See, the proper way to say it would be…”
“Would you… be quiet?!” Hom yelled.
”
”
Kaycee Browning (Ember Flame)
“
Knowing what I know today about how deeply the word feminist threatens the existing social compact, to say radical feminist now seems to me almost redundant. (Robin Morgan)
”
”
Clara Bingham (Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul)
“
Yeah, well, screw you Solo," I say bitterly. "You can drop dead and die!"
I'm aware of the redundancy in that statement.
”
”
Michael Grant
“
The white woman across the aisle from me says 'Look,
look at all the history, that house
on the hill there is over two hundred years old, '
as she points out the window past me
into what she has been taught. I have learned
little more about American history during my few days
back East than what I expected and far less
of what we should all know of the tribal stories
whose architecture is 15,000 years older
than the corners of the house that sits
museumed on the hill. 'Walden Pond, '
the woman on the train asks, 'Did you see Walden Pond? '
and I don't have a cruel enough heart to break
her own by telling her there are five Walden Ponds
on my little reservation out West
and at least a hundred more surrounding Spokane,
the city I pretended to call my home. 'Listen, '
I could have told her. 'I don't give a shit
about Walden. I know the Indians were living stories
around that pond before Walden's grandparents were born
and before his grandparents' grandparents were born.
I'm tired of hearing about Don-fucking-Henley saving it, too,
because that's redundant. If Don Henley's brothers and sisters
and mothers and father hadn't come here in the first place
then nothing would need to be saved.'
But I didn't say a word to the woman about Walden
Pond because she smiled so much and seemed delighted
that I thought to bring her an orange juice
back from the food car. I respect elders
of every color. All I really did was eat
my tasteless sandwich, drink my Diet Pepsi
and nod my head whenever the woman pointed out
another little piece of her country's history
while I, as all Indians have done
since this war began, made plans
for what I would do and say the next time
somebody from the enemy thought I was one of their own.
”
”
Sherman Alexie
“
Dr. Stadler once said that the first word of ‘Free, scientific inquiry’ was redundant. He seems to have forgotten it. Well, I’ll just say that ‘Governmental scientific inquiry’ is a contradiction in terms.
”
”
Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
“
The apologies, the true sign—that this was not the man you once knew, a man who would never have uttered that word to his son, sorry, and in English, no less. Not because he thought himself infallible, but because of his belief that a family should never have to say sorry, or please, or thank you, for that matter, these things being redundant, being contradictory to the parent-son relationship, needing to remain
”
”
Charles Yu (Interior Chinatown)
“
Scholars tell us that redundancy is correlated with retention. To minimize retention, a propagandist says one thing while showing the opposite. When the two differ, what we see tends to override what we hear.
”
”
Brooks Jackson (unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation)
“
Supervacaneous (adj.) Vainly added over and above what is needed. This word is in some way an example of itself, a redundant way of saying redundant, with a touch of vanity thrown in for good measure. Surfeited
”
”
Ammon Shea (Reading the Oxford English Dictionary: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages)
“
It distresses me somewhat to hear a person say, “I am a born-again Christian.” What’s wrong with such a statement? Well, what other kind of Christian is there? If rebirth is absolutely essential in order to get into the kingdom of God, as Jesus said it is, there cannot be such a thing as a non-born-again Christian. To say “born-again Christian” is like saying “Christian Christian.” It’s a redundancy, a kind of theological stuttering.
”
”
R.C. Sproul (Who Is The Holy Spirit? (Crucial Questions, #13))
“
One of the hardest things you'll ever do is give yourself permission to be in pain of any kind. There's a reason we have survival instincts, so that we don't die. That goes for humans, animals (redundant, I know), all the fishes in the sea, everyone. Some researchers even say that even plants feel pain and a cucumber will scream when you cut it. (And some others say that's crap because they have no brain or central nervous system.) The point is, we're all wusses. And emotional pain is the worst.
”
”
Anne Clendening (Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass)
“
Amora of Nornheim," Odin said, his voice the one he used for court meetings and assemblies, though there was no one else present. The resonance made the room feel even emptier. "You have been charged with treason, theft, destruction of a sacred relic and robbery. Do you have anything to say for yourself?"
With her head still bowed, she replied, "The charges are a bit redundant."
At his side, Loki felt Thor stiffen. Odin's brow creased. "Excuse me?"
"Are not theft and robbery the same, my king?" she asked. "I think you're trying to inflate the list of charges against me with synonyms.
”
”
Mackenzi Lee (Loki: Where Mischief Lies)
“
Consider the sentence "He closed the door firmly." It’s by no means a terrible sentence (at least it’s got an active verb going for it), but ask yourself if firmly really has to be there. You can argue that it expresses a degree of difference between "He closed the door" and "He slammed the door," and you’ll get no argument from me . . . but what about context? What about all the enlightening (not to say emotionally moving) prose which came before "He closed the door firmly?" Shouldn’t this tell us how he closed the door? And if the foregoing prose does tell us, isn’t firmly an extra word? Isn’t it redundant?
”
”
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
“
My father says most people who say they like poetry only pretend to like it.'
'I guess you like it?'
'I love it very much.' Her long hair swirled as she shook her head to correct herself. That's redundant. The word 'love' stands alone. 'Very much' only weakens it. I love words. Most people aren't very careful with them.
”
”
Laird Koenig (The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane)
“
Actual class struggles apart, one of the aesthetic ways you could prove that there was a class system in America was by cogitating on the word, or acronym, 'WASP.' First minted by E. Digby Baltzell in his book
The Protestant Establishment
, the term stood for 'White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.' Except that, as I never grew tired of pointing out, the 'W' was something of a redundancy (there being by definition no BASPs or JASPs for anyone to be confused with, or confused about). 'ASP,' on the other hand, lacked some of the all-important tone. There being so relatively few Anglo-Saxon Catholics in the United States, the 'S' [sic] was arguably surplus to requirements as well. But then the acronym AS would scarcely do, either. And it would raise an additional difficulty. If 'Anglo-Saxon' descent was the qualifying thing, which surely it was, then why were George Wallace and Jerry Falwell not WASPs? After all, they were not merely white and Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, but very emphatic about all three things. Whereas a man like William F. Buckley, say, despite being a white Irish Catholic, radiated the very sort of demeanor for which the word WASP had been coined to begin with. So, for the matter of that, did the dapper gentleman from Richmond, Virginia, Tom Wolfe. Could it be, then, that WASP was really a term of class rather than ethnicity? Q.E.D.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
“
hanged. ‘It was disclosed that a young white official had been found hanged to death in his cell …’ (The New York Times). ‘Hanged to death’ is redundant. So too, for that matter, are ‘starved to death’ and ‘strangled to death’. The writer was correct, however, in saying that the official had been found hanged and not hung. People are hanged; pictures and the like are hung.
”
”
Bill Bryson (Troublesome Words)
“
So what's your story?" Maddie didn't try to hide the singsong lilt of her voice as she spoke. She didn't want to. She'd learned at a very young age that nothing annoyed manly men more than girly girls, and if Maddie had one talent, it was truly exceptional girliness.
"Shut up and be quiet," Stefan snapped.
"That's just a tad redundant, FYI."
"Shut up!" he hissed near her ear.
Maddie couldn't help but shift her weight from foot to foot, almost pacing in place. She was careful of the ice and the snow, though. No use falling to the ground and having Stefan accidentally pull the trigger.
"You really do give a lot of orders," she told him.
He tightened his grip. "I'm the one with the gun."
"Well, yeah. Sure. Technically. But I'm the one with the winning personality, and that should count for something."
"You should be scared," he said in the same tone a movie villain might use to say You should be dead when the hero materializes five years later, hungry for vengeance.
Stefan was confused, and Maddie couldn't blame him.
So she turned back and shrugged. "Maybe. But I don't think you're a bad guy."
He let her go and spun her around, grabbing Logan's unzipped coat and pulling her closer.
"I. Have. The. Gun," he reminded her.
Maddie smiled and pulled away. "And I have Taylor Swift's signature scent. Doesn't make me a pop star. It just makes me smell like Taylor Swift, which isn't as great as it sounds because, to a bear, Taylor Swift smells delicious.
Stefan stuttered for a moment, then fell silent.
”
”
Ally Carter (Not If I Save You First)
“
But what is sovereignty? It is, they say, the power to make laws. Another absurdity, a relic of despotism. The nation had long seen kings issuing their commands in this form: for such is our pleasure; it wished to taste in its turn the pleasure of making laws. For fifty years it has brought them forth by myriads; always, be it understood, through the agency of representatives. The play is far from ended.
The definition of sovereignty was derived from the definition of the law. The law, they said, is the expression of the will of the sovereign: then, under a monarchy, the law is the expression of the will of the king; in a republic, the law is the expression of the will of the people. Aside from the difference in the number of wills, the two systems are exactly identical: both share the same error, namely, that the law is the expression of a will; it ought to be the expression of a fact. Moreover they followed good leaders: they took the citizen of Geneva for their prophet, and the contrat social for their Koran.
Bias and prejudice are apparent in all the phrases of the new legislators. The nation had suffered from a multitude of exclusions and privileges; its representatives issued the following declaration: All men are equal by nature and before the law; an ambiguous and redundant declaration. Men are equal by nature: does that mean that they are equal in size, beauty, talents, and virtue? No; they meant, then, political and civil equality. Then it would have been sufficient to have said: All men are equal before the law.
”
”
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (What Is Property?)
“
This will require self-abasement.’ Richard Cromwell says, ‘Shall I go out and find somebody who’s better at it than you are?’ ‘Richard Riche knows the art of creeping,’ Gregory offers. ‘And Wriothesley can crawl when required.’ He begins: ‘Most humbly prostrate before your Majesty…’ ‘Try, prostrate at the feet of your Majesty,’ Gregory says. ‘Redundant,’ Richard says. ‘Yes, but it makes her sound … flatter.
”
”
Hilary Mantel (The Mirror & the Light (Thomas Cromwell, #3))
“
all intents and purposes is colourless, redundant and hackneyed. Almost any other expression would be an improvement. ‘He is, to all intents and purposes, king of the island’ (Mail on Sunday) would be instantly made better by changing the central phrase to ‘in effect’ or removing it altogether. If the phrase must be used at all, it can always be shorn of the last two words. ‘To all intents’ says as much as ‘to all intents and purposes’.
”
”
Bill Bryson (Troublesome Words)
“
It’s never enough,” he repeated, “but it is so much more than we had before. Without the Millennium project there would be no drugs, there would be no surgical equipment, there would be no way to operate the generator—I would be redundant most of the time. They say funding will continue, but someday it will stop, and when the funding stops, most likely everything we have done will be put to waste. I do not see how we are going to continue after they have left.
”
”
Nina Munk (The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty)
“
Experiential versus the God eye! Possessing ‘ego vision’, a person’s view through her/his physical eyes is quite versatile; able to discern wide and varied vistas over huge distances or scrutinizing the minutest of details.
Ego’s very nature: capable of relatively expansive, detailed, and yet individualistic perspective is crucial. Separating itself out from the God Force, ego extracts infinite unique experiences, integral to humanity’s process of spiritualizing matter. Incarnating on the earth, achieving individualism is therefore critical for attainment of divinity.
Individualism may cause momentary estrangement from the God Self. However, this person has forgotten that they are everything in the mirror, the ‘sliver’ and the ‘ball of light’,” continues Kuan Yin.
During this complex passage Lena was inundated by infinite rapid-fire visuals: emanations from the God Mind.
“Further and unfortunately, wrong assumptions are made about suffering. Some individuals even believe that it is required, that suffering brings one closer to salvation. Quite the contrary,” disputes Kuan Yin, “the God Force likes to play. Therefore, if all individuals could unite creating a real sense of community many problems could be healed.
The God Force is separate and not separate, whole and not whole at the same time. Really, it is not ‘sliceable’, not reducible. Even when it is sliced into individual energies, it does not diminish the total God Force or the power of the individual.
Each of you has the potential for the God Force potency. However, no individual can overcome the God Force. There is a misinterpretation, (by some) that Satan is as powerful as God. Limited energy cannot live on its own. Every experience must exist and yet they (the limiting forces) can never exist on their own. Limited energy, then, is the experience of the absence of the God Force. Therefore, there is no need to fear it.
Those choosing such experiences have a need to understand how it feels to believe evil powers exist. Again, I say those who pursue this route are taking it too personally. They believe the story they’ve made up about themselves.
It is similar to a person going into an ice cream store and only choosing one flavor from many. Preoccupied with tasting that flavor for a very long time, they are probably quite sick and tired of it. Still, they don’t want to believe there are any other flavors available. The ‘agreement’, then, is to continue to believe in that particular flavor. Here’s where reincarnation and its opportunity for experiencing a vast array of perspectives, “agreements”, enters in. Another life offers another opportunity, a chance to ‘switch flavors’ so to speak.
Taking oneself too personally, however, can cause a soul to get caught up, stuck in redundancy: in a particular (and perhaps unfortunate) flavor. In such instances, the individual is forgetting one has the ability to choose his or her flavors, lives,” contends Kuan Yin.
”
”
Hope Bradford (Oracle of Compassion: The Living Word of Kuan Yin)
“
We lawyers do not write plain English. We use eight words to say what could be said in two. We use arcane phrases to express commonplace ideas. Seeking to be precise, we become redundant. Seeking to be cautious, we become verbose. Our sentences twist on, phrase within clause within clause, glazing the eyes and numbing the minds of our readers. The result is a writing style that has, according to one critic, four outstanding characteristics. It is (1) wordy, (2) unclear, (3) pompous, and (4) dull.
”
”
Richard C. Wydick (Plain English for Lawyers)
“
The relationship between the Sophotechs and the men as depicted in that tale made no sense. How could they be hostile to each other?”
Diomedes said, “Aren’t men right to fear machines which can perform all tasks men can do, artistic, intellectual, technical, a thousand or a million times better than they can do? Men become redundant.”
Phaethon shook his head, a look of distant distaste on his features, as if he were once again confronted with a falsehood that would not die no matter how often it was denounced. In a voice of painstaking patience, he said: “Efficiency does not harm the inefficient. Quite the opposite. That is simply not the way it works. Take me, for example. Look around: I employed partials to do the thought-box junction spotting when I built this ship. My employees were not as skilled as I was in junction spotting. It took them three hours to do the robopsychology checks and hierarchy links I could have done in one hour. But they were in no danger of competition from me. My time is too valuable. In that same hour it would have taken me to spot their thought-box junction, I can earn far more than their three-hour wages by writing supervision architecture thought flows. And it’s the same with me and the Sophotechs.
“Any midlevel Sophotech could have written in one second the architecture it takes me, even with my implants, an hour to compose. But if, in that same one second of time, that Sophotech can produce something more valuable—exploring the depth of abstract mathematics, or inventing a new scientific miracle, anything at all (provided that it will earn more in that second than I earn in an hour)—then the competition is not making me redundant. The Sophotech still needs me and receives the benefit of my labor. Since I am going to get the benefit of every new invention and new miracle put out on the market, I want to free up as many of those seconds of Sophotech time as my humble labor can do.
“And I get the lion’s share of the benefit from the swap. I only save him a second of time; he creates wonder upon wonder for me. No matter what my fear of or distaste for Sophotechs, the forces in the marketplace, our need for each other, draw us together.
“So you see why I say that not a thing the Silent One said about Sophotechs made sense. I do not understand how they could have afforded to hate each other. Machines don’t make us redundant; they increase our efficiency in every way. And the bids of workers eager to compete for Sophotech time creates a market for merely human work, which it would not be efficient for Sophotechs to underbid.
”
”
John C. Wright (The Golden Transcendence (Golden Age, #3))
“
Once upon a time (say, for Dante), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to design works of art so that they might be experienced on several levels. Now it is not. It reinforces the principle of redundancy that is the principal affliction of modern life.
Once upon a time (a time when high art was scarce), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to interpret works of art. Now it is not. What we decidedly do not need now is further to assimilate Art into Thought, or (worse yet) Art into Culture.
”
”
Susan Sontag (Against Interpretation and Other Essays)
“
That’s what the history books say . . . but history books are written by the victors. The official history of emotion research, from Darwin to James to behaviorism to salvation, is a byproduct of the classical view. In reality, the alleged dark ages included an outpouring of research demonstrating that emotion essences don’t exist. Yes, the same kind of counterevidence that we saw in chapter 1 was discovered seventy years earlier . . . and then forgotten. As a result, massive amounts of time and money are being wasted today in a redundant search for fingerprints of emotion.
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Lisa Feldman Barrett (How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain)
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Werewolves are not a subject for academe,” she said, “but you know what the professors would be saying if they were. ‘Monsters die out when the collective imagination no longer needs them. Species death like this is nothing more than a shift in the aggregate psychic agenda. In ages past the beast in man was hidden in the dark, disavowed. The transparency of modern history makes that impossible: We’ve seen ourselves in the concentration camps, the gulags, the jungles, the killing fields, we’ve read ourselves in the annals of True Crime. Technology turned up the lights and now there’s no getting away from the fact: The beast is redundant. It’s been us all along.
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Glen Duncan (The Last Werewolf (The Last Werewolf, #1))
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Marriage is inefficient!” she proclaims. “The whole construct is a model of wasted resources. The wife often stays home to care for the children, or even a single child, abandoning the career she worked so hard for, losing years of creative output. Beyond the wasting of talent, think of the physical waste. For every home, there are so many redundancies. How many toasters do you think there are in the world?” “I have no idea.” “Seriously, just guess.” “Ten million?” I say impatiently. “More than two hundred million! And how often do you think the average household uses its toaster?” Once again, she doesn’t wait for my answer. “Just 2.6 hours per year. Two hundred million toasters are sitting unused, statistically speaking, more than 99.97 percent of their active lives.
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Michelle Richmond (The Marriage Pact)
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I would like to say at the outset that I have little or no interest in mindlessly categorising individuals, and certainly not of “reducing” them to mere labels. If I attempt to group together certain individuals’ experiences, it is to better understand them, their distress and motiva- tions, and what underlies their difficulties. As will become clear, in one sense the term borderline becomes redundant, as the individual’s par- ticular early relational experiences are understood to play the central role in their development and life experience. Yet even these do not ultimately “define” the individual, but rather, through understanding and working through their traumatic experience, the individual can be freed to fully develop, use, and manifest themselves in satisfying and fulfilling ways. The term borderline is, for me, left as a signifier of the particular kinds of reasons that the individual’s struggle to reach this position may have been so difficult.
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Marcus West (Into the Darkest Places: Early Relational Trauma and Borderline States of Mind)
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Suppose two countries, A and B. A possesses over B all kinds of advantages. You infer from this, that every sort of industry will concentrate itself in A, and that B is powerless. A, you say, sells much more than it buys; B buys much more than it sells. I might dispute this, but I respect your hypothesis. On this hypothesis, labour is much in demand in A, and will soon rise in price there. Iron, coal, land, food, capital, are much in demand in A, and they will soon rise in price there. Contemporaneously with this, labour, iron, coal, land, food, capital, are in little request in B, and will soon fall in price there. Nor is this all. While A is always selling, and B is always buying, money passes from B to A. It becomes abundant in A, and scarce in B. But abundance of money means that we must have plenty of it to buy everything else. Then in A, to the real dearness which arises from a very active demand, there is added a nominal dearness, which is due to a redundancy of the precious metals. Scarcity
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Frédéric Bastiat (Economic Sophisms (Illustrated))
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Leonid Gavrilov, a researcher at the University of Chicago, argues that human beings fail the way all complex systems fail: randomly and gradually. As engineers have long recognized, simple devices typically do not age. They function reliably until a critical component fails, and the whole thing dies in an instant. A windup toy, for example, works smoothly until a gear rusts or a spring breaks, and then it doesn’t work at all. But complex systems—power plants, say—have to survive and function despite having thousands of critical, potentially fragile components. Engineers therefore design these machines with multiple layers of redundancy: with backup systems, and backup systems for the backup systems. The backups may not be as efficient as the first-line components, but they allow the machine to keep going even as damage accumulates. Gavrilov argues that, within the parameters established by our genes, that’s exactly how human beings appear to work. We have an extra kidney, an extra lung, an extra gonad, extra teeth.
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Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End)
“
The spectrum of hatred against “irregardless” might be unmatched. Everyone claims to hate the word “moist,” but the dislike is general and jokey: ew, gross, “moist,” bleh. People’s hatred of “irregardless” is specific and vehemently serious: it cannot mean “without regard to” but must mean “with regard to,” so it’s nonsensical and shouldn’t exist; it’s a double negative and therefore not allowable by anyone with sense and judgment; it’s a redundant blend of “irrespective” and “regardless,” and we don’t need it; it is illogical and therefore not a word; it is a hallmark of uneducated speech and shouldn’t be entered into the dictionary. All of these complaints point in one direction: “irregardless” is evidence that English is going to hell, and you, Merriam-Webster, are skipping down the easy path, merrily swinging the handbasket. The truth is I felt for the complainant. “Irregardless” was just wrong, I thought—I knew this deep down at a molecular level, and no dictionary entry was going to convince me otherwise. But sharing my personal linguistic beef with the world was not part of the job, so I buttoned my yap and answered the correspondence. Yes, it’s entered, I said, but please note that it’s marked “nonstandard” (which is a fancy way of saying it’s not accepted by most educated speakers of English) and we have a very long usage paragraph after the one-word definition that explains you should use “regardless” instead. We are duty-bound to record the language as it is used, I concluded, gritting my teeth and mentally sprinkling scare quotes throughout the entire sentence.
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Kory Stamper (Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries)
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We say “universe” and the word makes us think of a possible unification of things. One can be a spiritualist, a materialist, a pantheist, just as one can be indifferent to philosophy and satisfied with common sense: the fact remains that one always conceives of one or several simple principles by which the whole of material and moral things might be explained. This is because our intelligence loves simplicity. It seeks to reduce effort, and insists that nature was arranged in such a way as to demand of us, in order to be thought, the least possible labor. It therefore provides itself with the exact minimum of elements and principles with which to recompose the indefinite series of objects and events. But if instead of reconstructing things ideally for the greater satisfaction of our reason we confine ourselves purely and simply to what is given us by experience, we should think and express ourselves in quite another way. While our intelligence with its habits of economy imagines effects as strictly proportioned to their causes, nature, in its extravagance, puts into the cause much more than is required to produce the effect. While our motto is Exactly what is necessary, nature’s motto is More than is necessary,—too much of this, too much of that, too much of everything. Reality, as James sees it, is redundant and superabundant. Between this reality and the one constructed by the philosophers, I believe he would have established the same relation as between the life we live every day and the life which actors portray in the evening on the stage. On the stage, each actor says and does only what has to be said and done; the scenes are clear-cut; the play has a beginning, a middle and an end; and everything is worked out as economically as possible with a view to an ending which will be happy or tragic. But in life, a multitude of useless things are said, many superfluous gestures made, there are no sharply-drawn situations; nothing happens as simply or as completely or as nicely as we should like; the scenes overlap; things neither begin nor end; there is no perfectly satisfying ending, nor absolutely decisive gesture, none of those telling words which give us pause: all the effects are spoiled. Such is human life.
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Henri Bergson (The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics)
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The hint of his smile grew harder and more stressed; this was as near as he came to showing an emotion; the emotion was anger. But he answered in his even, unhurried drawl, “You know, Dr. Stadler once said that the first word of ‘Free, scientific inquiry’ was redundant. He seems to have forgotten it. Well, I’ll just say that ‘Governmental scientific inquiry’ is a contradiction in terms.
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Ayn Rand
“
While picking the good, we have the best of intentions in mind; say, like using these traits in the best possible way. Over time and circumstances, some of these traits become redundant and over-used. Situations change while traits don’t. This leads to the traits falling behind in the cycle of survival.
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Patrick Grayson (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: A Mental Disorder Treatment To Defeat Addictions, Depression, and Anxieties, 2nd Edition)
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Paul is not being redundant when he says, “Rejoice, and again I say rejoice” (Philippians 4:4). He effectively creates a picture for us. Imagine the sight of a little lamb coming out of the barn and jumping up once, then jumping up again. He leaps across the fields and hills, jumping as if for the sheer fun of it. So we are to rejoice and keep on rejoicing, not because things are wonderful, but because of the joy that comes from knowing the Lord is in the middle of things that are going on. . . . No matter how much you might want to be like Scarlett O’Hara and deal with life’s realities tomorrow, that is no way to live. No matter your circumstances, rejoice and rejoice again, because God is the author and finisher of life. He is in the middle of everything you face, no matter what.
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Anonymous (Joy for the Journey: Devotional: Morning and Evening)
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Grow in your Career by working towards making yourself redundant for the current role!
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Masood Sayed
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So this made-up religion--"
"I didn't say made-up. I said brand new. 'Made-up religion' is redundant.
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Daryl Gregory (Afterparty)
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The cat uses trees, as stated, as many things but here it would not uncommon to see the oak as the marker, not the stone. Cats would spray the tree, not necessarily the rock.
A rock as a further marker would be a non-essential redundancy that a cat would more or less ignore. It would be like saying one needed to ignore the law of God (written on the stone) to honour their promise to not honour foreign gods. The human reaction of obvious strangeness would begin here. If the tree is seen as an item to climb, the rendition would get more queer to the human interpretation.
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Leviak B. Kelly (Religion: The Ultimate STD: Living a Spiritual Life without Dogmatics or Cultural Destruction)
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TO BE A LAWYER in a lawless time was like being a clown among the humorless: which was to say, either completely redundant or absolutely essential.
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Salman Rushdie (Quichotte)
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Olsen says. “In nature, a bee doesn’t have to pay to get nectar. It just goes there and by accident pollinates the flower—a good business model is one where there is a food chain.” Utopian? Of course. Possible? Who knows? But the fact that people with sophisticated understandings of markets and technology are raising funds to build systems designed to make money itself redundant is noteworthy, to say the least.
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Michael J. Casey (The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything)
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Amen,’ I say, a second after everyone else. Now that I’m unemployed, I could do with some money—Oh, no. What would Alex make of me being unemployed? Well, I was made redundant. I’m sure he’ll understand.
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Lizzie Damilola Blackburn (Yinka, Where is Your Huzband?)
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By contrast, what has been worked away at in recent years has been a project in which verifiable truth is cast out. In its place comes that great Oprah-ism: “my truth.” The idea that I have “my truth” and you have yours makes the very idea of objective truth redundant. It says that a thing becomes so because I feel it to be so or say that it is so. At its most extreme, it is a reversion to a form of magical thinking. Precisely the thinking that the Enlightenment thinkers chased out. And perhaps that is why the Enlightenment thinkers have become such a focus for assault. Because the system they set up is antithetical to the system that is being constructed today: a system entirely opposed to the idea of rationalism and objective truth; a system dedicated to sweeping away everyone from the past as well as the present who does not bow down to the great god of the present: “me.
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Douglas Murray (The War on the West)
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Rather, researchers recommend that we implement a specific sequence of actions in response to our teammates’ contributions: we should acknowledge, repeat, rephrase, and elaborate on what other group members say. Studies show that engaging in this kind of communication elicits more complete and comprehensive information. It re-exposes the entire group to the information that was shared initially, improving group members’ understanding of and memory for that information. And it increases the accuracy of the information that is shared, a process that psychologists call “error pruning.” Although it may seem cumbersome or redundant, research suggests that this kind of enhanced communication is part of what makes expert teamwork so effective. A study of airplane pilots, for example, found that experienced aviators regularly repeated, restated, and elaborated on what their fellow pilots said, while novice pilots failed to do so—and as a result, the less experienced pilots formed sparser and less accurate memories of their time in the air.
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Annie Murphy Paul (The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain)
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what has been worked away at in recent years has been a project in which verifiable truth is cast out. In its place comes that great Oprah-ism: “my truth.” The idea that I have “my truth” and you have yours makes the very idea of objective truth redundant. It says that a thing becomes so because I feel it to be so or say that it is so. At its most extreme, it is a reversion to a form of magical thinking. Precisely the thinking that the Enlightenment thinkers chased out. And perhaps that is why the Enlightenment thinkers have become such a focus for assault. Because the system they set up is antithetical to the system that is being constructed today: a system entirely opposed to the idea of rationalism and objective truth; a system dedicated to sweeping away everyone from the past as well as the present who does not bow down to the great god of the present: “me.
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Douglas Murray (The War on the West)
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For the love of grandma's peach preserves, women's clothing needs new sizing standards, especially that horribly redundant "extra large." That's like saying Ida Mae's not just big. She's big big." Let's try something more reasonable, maybe even introduce southern sizing, like tee-tiny, middlin', over-filled corn muffin, biscuit-fluffy, dumplin' and sack o' taters.
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Kelly Kazek (Not Quite Right: Mostly True Tales of a Weird News Reporter)
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Earlier this morning,' Bukka told him, 'I entertained our great and wise sage, Vidyasagar, the Ocean of Knowledge, and I suggested to him that his masterwork-in-progress, his inquiry into the Sixteen Systems of Philosophy, was reportedly of a brilliance so extraordinary that it would be a tragedy if it ended up incomplete, unfinished, because of the distractions of his work at court. I also took the liberty to mention that astrology was not my personal cup of tea, so that the daily morning horoscope readings demanded by my brother would no longer be required. I must say that on the whole he took it very well. He is a man of infinite grace, and when he let out a single wordless ejaculation—a 'ha!' so loud that it frightened the horses in the stables—I understood this to be part of his transcendent spiritual practice, a controlled exhalation from his body in which he expelled all that was now redundant. A letting-go. After that he took his leave and I believe he has retreated into his original cave of so long ago, near the perimeter of the Mandana complex, to begin a ninety-one-day program of meditation and soul renewal. I know that we will all be grateful for the fruits of this disciplined activity and for the rebirth of his spirit in an even more bountiful incarnation. He is the greatest of us all.'
'You fired him,' Haleya Kote dared to summarize.
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Salman Rushdie (Victory City)
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Oh, on the stranger-than-fiction front…Actually nothing is stranger than fiction. You may well have ‘troubling dreams’, these days, but you’re not going to wake up ‘transformed into a gigantic insect’. And such lines as no writer could invent a character more outlandish than our would-be president and our would-be president has made satire redundant are almost touchingly naive. One thing literature can do, and has always done and will always go on doing (with no particular exertion), is conjure up characters stranger than Trump. As for satire: while turning him into art, would Swift, Pope, Dickens, Evelyn Waugh, or Don DeLillo, say, feel that there was nothing to add?
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Martin Amis (Inside Story)
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fact, good communication is a lot like pasta sauce. The more you boil down and reduce a sauce, the more dynamic the flavor. Speaking redundantly and using filler words in your communication is like adding water to the sauce. The result is something bland and forgettable.
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Bill McGowan (Pitch Perfect: How to Say It Right the First Time, Every Time (How to Say It Right the First Time, Every Time Hardcover))
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In this world, anything is possible. The United States might win a future war relying solely on air power for the first time in history, with no American or local ground forces involved and no meaningful threat of their deployment. That possibility cannot be excluded. The Rumsfeld vision of military transformation, however, does not pursue that as a possibility: it relies on it as a certainty. By focusing all of America's defense resources on the single medium of air power, Rumsfeld is betting America's future security on the conviction that the U.S. armed forces will be able to do every time what no military to date has ever been able to do. In doing so, he is greatly simplifying the task of those preparing to fight the United States by presenting them with only one threat to defeat.
A sound program of military transformation would proceed in exactly the opposite way. It would recognize the value of America's technological advantage in the area of PGMs. It would continue to enlarge and enhance them, much as Rumsfeld currently proposes. But it would not do so at the expense of the unique capabilities that ground forces bring to bear. It would focus, instead, on developing the capabilities provided by air power. Ground forces can seize and hold terrain, separate hostile groups, and comb through urban with infinitely greater precision and distinction between combatant and non-combatant that can air power. They can present the enemy with unacceptable situations simply by occupying a given piece of land, forcing the enemy to take actions that reveal intentions and expose the enemy to destruction. And it goes without saying that only ground forces can execute the peacemaking, peacekeeping, and reconstruction activities that have been essential to success in most of the wars America has fought in the past hundred years.
Above all, the United States must avoid the search for "efficiency" in military affairs. Redundancy is inherently a virtue in war. America's leaders should intentionally design systems with overlapping capabilities, spread across the services, and should intentionally support weapons that do not directly contribute to the overarching vision of war that they are pursuing. America should continue to try to build armed forces that are the best in every category and have the latent capabilities to meet challenges that cannot now even be imagined.
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Frederick Kagan
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Racist policy” is more tangible and exacting, and more likely to be immediately understood by people, including its victims, who may not have the benefit of extensive fluency in racial terms. “Racist policy” says exactly what the problem is and where the problem is. “Institutional racism” and “structural racism” and “systemic racism” are redundant. Racism itself is institutional, structural, and systemic.
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Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
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The words might be different, but they’re all saying the redundant same thing: “When it stopped being perfect, I stopped, too.
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Jon Acuff (Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done)
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Resources such as energy, matter and information can flow through these networks in ways that achieve a fine balance between the system’s efficiency and its resilience. Efficiency occurs when a system streamlines and simplifies its resource flow to achieve its aims, say by channelling resources directly between the larger nodes. Resilience, however, depends upon diversity and redundancy in the network, which means that there are ample alternative connections and options in times of shock or change. Too much efficiency makes a system vulnerable (as global financial regulators realised too late in 2008) while too much resilience makes it stagnant: vitality and robustness lie in a balance between the two.
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Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist)
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For a presentation assignment, you might pick a day 2 weeks in advance of the actual presentations and ask students to bring their laptops to class. In the final 10 minutes of a class in which you present some new material to them, ask them to pair up and work together on the creation of a single slide designed to teach an audience about Concept A. In the following class sessions, allot the final 10 minutes of each class to asking a handful of students to stand up and give a 2-minute presentation of the slide they created. Better yet, as in the writing example, make it the final 15 minutes and spend the first 5 of those reminding them that reading text directly from slides can produce something called the redundancy effect, which can reduce learning, but that too much difference between what's on the slide and what they say also has been shown to reduce learning. So they should be searching for what Michelle Miller described as the “‘Goldilocks’ principle with respect to the discrepancy between the narration and the visually presented slide”—they should clearly reference and highlight the key components of what they have put on the slide, but not simply read it out directly (Miller 2014, p. 154). Giving students the opportunity to create several practice slides and then to work on speaking those slides to an audience would go a long way toward improving the majority of student presentations I have seen.
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James M. Lang (Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning)
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Taking those two considerations together, we reach the following interesting suggestion, which is that, whenever people attempt to close up the redundancy of practical reasoning by choosing between appearances, they are also disposed to interpret those appearances as intrinsically meaningful, and to present the meaning that they discover through a kind of reasoned dialogue, the goal of which is to secure some measure of agreement in judgements among those who have an interest in the choice. In saying this, we come very close to the eighteenth-century idea of taste, as a faculty whereby rational beings order their lives through a socially engendered sense of the right and wrong appearance.
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Roger Scruton (Beauty)
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First, adaptability and resilience require diversity, variation, and fluctuations. Allen (2001) describes the need for this redundancy (that is, having more options or pathways that are necessary to function like a machine) as the law of excess diversity. He is saying that unless there are more pathways or options (called degrees of freedom by mathematicians) than are required to operate efficiently, there is no resilience to changing circumstances. However much diversity seems requisite (Ashby, 1956) for a system to function at a given time, more than this will be required to cope with what is likely to happen in the future.
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Jean G. Boulton (Embracing Complexity: Strategic Perspectives for an Age of Turbulence)
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What does it mean to assign the value null to a variable? How about “We intend to assign an object to this variable at some point, but we haven’t yet.” Now, if you’re scratching your head and saying “Hmm, why didn’t they just use undefined for that?” then you’re in good company. The answer comes from the very beginnings of JavaScript. The idea was to have one value for variables that haven’t been initialized to anything yet, and another that means the lack of an object. It isn’t pretty, and it’s a little redundant, but it is what it is at this point. Just
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Eric Freeman (Head First JavaScript Programming: A Brain-Friendly Guide)
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Commit to mastering three to four new words every day. People with a rich vocabulary seldom have trouble articulating their views and display greater confidence while talking to people. The difference between a functional vocabulary and extensive vocabulary can be the difference between a black and white and vivid, colorful picture. Paint a picture with your words to make the conversation more interesting and compelling. Stay away from redundant words and phrases. Avoid using conversation fillers. Keep your sentences short, crisp and to the point. Do not use the most highfalutin words to flaunt your vocabulary. Instead be an effective communicator by using words that convey your ideas and feelings most appropriately. Less is always more in a conversation. Try to say more by using less yet effective words and phrases. Think of better and more articulate ways to convey your emotions and ideas, For example, you can say “famished” in place of “very hungry” or “livid” instead of “very angry or upset.” Try to convey your ideas using more effective words. Replace redundant words and phrases in your daily conversations. For example, instead of saying, “They said xyz about my looks” say “they commented on my looks.” The idea is to make your speech crisper, more articulate and tighter by replacing ineffectual words/phrases with more meaningful expressions. Everyday words and phrases such as “big” can become “gigantic,” “massive” or “colossal.” Similarly, scared can become “petrified” and “spooked,” hungry become “famished” and so on. Consciously think of more effective ways to convey the same meaning. This practice will make you come across as a more engaging, interesting and vibrant conversationalist. A richer and more power-packed vocabulary lends more character, feelings and sensory experiences to the conversation. The way to go about it is – Use a diary or notebook for listing new words and phrases you come across each day. You can also randomly pick three new words to learn from the dictionary every day, and try to use it in your speech or conversation. Install ‘word a day’ applications on your phones to keep enriching your vocabulary. It’s a work in progress. You’ll never know everything. Even if you believe you have a limited vocabulary or aren’t able to hold a conversation because you don’t know how best to express yourself, breathe easy. There are plenty of ways to build a powerful vocabulary if you have the initiative.
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Keith Coleman (Effective Communication Skills: How to Enjoy Conversations, Build Assertiveness, & Have Great Interactions for Meaningful Relationships (Speak Fearlessly Book 2))
“
the first word of ‘Free, scientific inquiry’ was redundant. He seems to have forgotten it. Well, I’ll just say that ‘Governmental scientific inquiry’ is a contradiction in terms.
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Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
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The reason that I do not typically use the command word “stay” during training is because it is redundant. If I instruct you to sit, I should not have to tell you to stay sitting. What value is a sit without the stay? Sit implies stay. Once I have given the sit command, the assumption is that the dog should remain in that position until told otherwise. That’s the standard. The sit command can be considered the warning that it’s unacceptable to get up. However, if you want to offer the additional information, you may say “stay” once the dog is sitting. Then, that becomes the warning. Only say it once. That is the message that tells the dog of your expectations. A warning should be delivered one time. If the dog does not heed the warning, then the consequence must be delivered. Otherwise, you will create a dog that will simply wait for the second or third or fourth warning word before changing his behavior.
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Tammie Rogers (Dog Algebra: When Positive Reinforcement Fails To Solve The Problem)
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Racist policies have been described by other terms: “institutional racism,” “structural racism,” and “systemic racism,” for instance. But those are vaguer terms than “racist policy.” When I use them I find myself having to immediately explain what they mean. “Racist policy” is more tangible and exacting, and more likely to be immediately understood by people, including its victims, who may not have the benefit of extensive fluency in racial terms. “Racist policy” says exactly what the problem is and where the problem is. “Institutional racism” and “structural racism” and “systemic racism” are redundant. Racism itself is institutional, structural, and systemic.
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Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
“
Do you often cook?” She would never have guessed it of him.
“Sí. I enjoy it. I have never really cooked for anyone before now, though.” The confession surprised her, and her eyes widened.
“Really?”
“I don’t bring women here.”
“Really?”
“Will you stop saying ‘really’? It’s . . .”
“Aggravating?” she supplied without thinking.
“It’s . . . ,” he continued, ignoring her.
“Frustrating?”
“Annoying.” The word was gritted out between teeth so tightly clenched, Cleo actually feared he’d break them.
“‘Frustrating’ and ‘aggravating’ are synonyms for ‘annoying,’” she pointed out.
“I wanted to use ‘annoying.’ Which is what you’re being right now. In addition to being frustrating and aggravating.”
“And you’re being redundant.”
“You’re really difficult to talk to sometimes,” he accused, his accent thickening with every word, and she shrugged a little shamefacedly.
“I know,” she confessed. “It’s a defense mechanism.”
“I don’t mean to put you on the defensive, but it seems to be your natural state.”
“It’s my natural state around you.
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Natasha Anders (A Ruthless Proposition)
“
To many intellectuals such as Celsus, the whole idea of a ‘Creation myth’ was not only implausible but redundant. During this period in Rome, a popular and influential philosophical theory offered an alternative view. This theory – an Epicurean one – stated that everything in the world was made not by any divine being but by the collision and combination of atoms. According to this school of thought, these particles were invisible to the naked eye but they had their own structure and could not be cut (temno) into any smaller particles: they were a-temnos – ‘the uncuttable thing’: the atom. Everything that you see or feel, these materialists argued, was made up of two things: atoms and space ‘in which these bodies are and through which they move this way and that’. Even living creatures were made from them: humans were, as one (hostile) author summarized, not made by God but were instead nothing more than ‘a haphazard union of elements’.
The distinct species of animals were explained by a form of proto-Darwinism. As the Roman poet and atomist Lucretius wrote, nature put forth many species. Those that had useful characteristics – the fox and its cunning, say, or the dog and its intelligence – survived, thrived and reproduced. Those creatures that lacked these ‘lay at the mercy of others for prey and profit . . . until nature brought that race to destruction’.
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Catherine Nixey (The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World)
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If the girls wish to romp outdoors instead of sitting in a cheerless house,” Devon said, “I don’t see what harm it would do. In fact, what reason is there to hang black cloth over the windows? Why not take it down and let in the sun?”
Kathleen shook her head. “It would be scandalous to remove the mourning cloth so soon.”
“Even here?”
“Hampshire is hardly at the extremity of civilization, my lord.”
“Still, who would object?”
“I would. I couldn’t dishonor Theo’s memory that way.”
“For God’s sake, he won’t know. It helps no one, including my late cousin, for an entire household to live in gloom. I can’t conceive that he would have wanted it.”
“You didn’t know him well enough to judge what he would have wanted,” Kathleen retorted. “And in any case, the rules can’t be set aside.”
“What if the rules don’t serve? What if they do more harm than good?”
“Just because you don’t understand or agree with something doesn’t mean that it lacks merit.”
“Agreed. But you can’t deny that some traditions were invented by idiots.”
“I don’t wish to discuss it,” Kathleen said, quickening her step.
“Dueling, for example,” Devon continued, easily keeping pace with her. “Human sacrifice. Taking multiple wives--I’m sure you’re sorry we’ve lost that tradition.”
“I suppose you’d have ten wives if you could.”
“I’d be sufficiently miserable with one. The other nine would be redundant.”
She shot him an incredulous glance. “My lord, I am a widow. Have you no understanding of appropriate conversation for a woman in my situation?”
Apparently not, judging by his expression.
“What does one discuss with widows?” he asked.
“No subject that could be considered sad, shocking, or inappropriately humorous.”
“That leaves me with nothing to say, then.”
“Thank God,” she said fervently, and he grinned.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Cold-Hearted Rake (The Ravenels, #1))
“
Most of what we say and do is unnecessary: remove the superfluity, and you will have more time and less bother. So in every case one should prompt oneself: ‘Is this, or is it not, something necessary?’ And the removal of the unnecessary should apply not only to actions but to thoughts also: then no redundant actions either will follow.
”
”
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)