Wednesday, June 27, 2012

As opposed to 7 a.m. at night?

This redundancy is one I'm mentioning only because it's a pet peeve of mine.  Sadly, I do catch myself saying it from time to time because I hear it so often, and then I grit my teeth as soon as I realise I've said it!  I hear this most often when people are relating a story and say, "This happened at 10 a.m. in the morning" or "I was there at 3 p.m. in the afternoon." When I hear that (depending on who the speaker is), I'll make the joke, "As opposed to 10 a.m. in the afternoon?" or "As opposed to 3 p.m. in the morning?" respectively.  It really catches people off guard, and I haven't seen one person not laugh about it (thankfully for me!).  It's one thing if you want to say, "I was there at 3 in the afternoon" or "I was there at 3 p.m.," but it's otherwise redundant to use the a.m. or p.m. with morning or afternoon, or even night, as the case may be.

Getting tired of redundancies yet?  I've only one more left to mention, so stay tuned for upcoming new topics!

No comments:

Post a Comment