Comment on Open Thread, May 19 - 25, 2014

Mon, 26 May 2014 20:36:09 GMT

The pair "tend to always" or "always tend to". Sometimes they come off to me as a way to exploit the rhetorical force of "always" while committing only to a hedged "tend to", in which case they can condense a two-step of terrific triviality into three words. There are likely other phrases that can provide plausibly deniable pseudo-certainty but I can't think of any.

More generally, the Unix utility diction tries to pick out "frequently misused, bad or wordy diction", which is a kinda related precedent.

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