O pleonasm it's that figure of speech that makes you look with a little contempt at your colleague who uttered it. When they use repetitive terms and you immediately think: “Wow, what a dumb guy! He doesn't even know how to speak properly”. A pleonasm is a construction figure in which the interlocutor uses several words to express a single idea that could be said with just one word. It ends up being unnecessary redundancy or repetition.
These are terms that use more words than enough. And when you listen, you think, “That's logical. When that happens, so this here is like this. You do not have to say".
Many people consider the use of pleonasm as “talking, talking and saying almost nothing”. Or “say a pound, but say an ounce”.
This repetition of words with the same meaning alters the structure of the sentence, giving more expressiveness to what you want to communicate. Characteristic of the construction figures.
It can occur by pure poetic license, as in cases of cultural productions. Or it can happen for fun, or for little knowledge of the Portuguese language culture.
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Let's go to the examples?
The main pleonasms you should be aware of are:
Note that in some examples there are more than two words with the same meaning. And even two pleonasms being committed in the same sentence. This repetition is totally unnecessary in our daily lives.
When someone says he's going to “climb up”, you immediately think of answering that “if he's going to go up, of course it's up”. This also happens with the “trio of three”, “double of two”, etc.
There are issues that are very obvious, like the more than two terms being used in the penultimate example. The sun has always been and will always be hot and, of course, the person exposed will be burned, albeit mildly. The most appropriate way to say the phrase “boy, get out of the hot sun and you're going to get all burned”, would be to cut words with the same meaning. Example: “Boy, get off the street, the sun is too strong”. The word strong best expresses the characteristic of the sun, for, as we said, it will never cease to be hot. However, there are times of the day when it will be with greater or lesser intensity. That is, weak and strong.
In the last example, there are also more than two words in redundancy. Just like the example of the sun, rain always falls and it always wets what it touches. See a more appropriate way to say such a phrase: “Today's rain was good for the plants”.
Understand what a pleonasm is? To learn more about speech figures, continue on our blog.
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