I hate pleonasms.
What’s a pleonasm you ask? I will tell you. It’s a thing designed to be difficult for me to notice, which I must remove, partly because they aren’t supposed to be there, but mostly because I just don’t like them. They are words that are really unnecessary but that people still include in their writing:
Tuna fish
ATM machine
Safe haven
Foreign imports
Free gift
So why do I hate them? You see, there are these things called “writers.” A writer’s job is to make my job as difficult as it can possibly be by being arrogant, stupid and unbearable. Writers decide to flip out when they see a circle around one of their words, because I put that circle there, and it means that I don’t like that word, which means that I don’t want it to be there, which means that they have to remove it.
Unfortunately, this opens up the door for a writer to do two of their favorite things in the whole world: 1) to ignore the circle, hoping that by the time their work returns to me for the final purging of errors I will be too tired and malnourished to see the error again, which I probably will be, or 2) to find me and force me to spend a significant portion of my life listening to their complaints and reasons as to why the word in question should not, in fact, be circled, as if I am not, in fact, the copy editor whose job it is to circle words like the one in question.
A writer will often try to explain to me the artistic elements and necessity of the word “that” in a sentence like this one:
“The cookie that I fed to my cactus this morning was delicious. Don’t ask me how I know.”
Notice that the word “that” is stupid and unnecessary. To my writers, this word is highly appealing, and its removal greatly detracts from their efforts. Mostly though, I think that my writers spend ridiculous amounts of time inserting pleonasms into their works as a covert group effort to drive me over the brink of insanity.
Often when encountering pleonasms, I regret my decision to become a copy editor, and I wonder how much I would need to pay to get my soul back — but then I stop and think about the difference I make in the world every day by removing these somewhat unnecessary words.
Then I cut myself and I usually feel slightly better.
