Son of Redundancy

Sometimes I hear people say 'raise up', as in "Raise up your hands." I think about stuff like that. I think," Can you raise DOWN your hands?'  Why would you say 'up' if saying 'down' doesn't make sense?

Today I listened to a popular, local radio talk show host discussing oil drilling off the coast of Santa Barbara.  The host asked his oil industry guest, "Do you extract OUT the fracking residue?" I wondered, could you extract IN the residue?

The word 'extract' probably comes from the Latin verb extraho, which means 'drag out'.  So if 'extract' means 'drag out', then 'extract out' means 'drag out out.'  Why tack a preposition like 'out' onto a verb that already includes the preposition's meaning?

I see a sign in a convenience store that reads, 'ATM Machine Inside'.  I wonder what they think the 'M' in ATM stands for.  I think then that the sign really means, 'Automatic Teller Machine Machine Inside'.

Shouldn't we rewrite that sign to read, AT Machine Inside?  Maybe there shouldn't be a space between the 'T' and the 'M'.  Otherwise, you might think, "What's an AT machine?

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Then I heard people talking on the phone who said into the phone, 'Where are you at?"  I thought about that, too.  I wondered, "Where are they at WHAT?"

It sounds to me that there's a word missing, the object of the preposition 'at'.  I wonder if they don't mean to say, "Where are you at work?" but they forgot to say the last word.  The word 'where' is good enough, it gets the job done.  It's already asking the question about 'at'.

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Sometimes I think about how people have taken to saying 'exact same', as in, "It was mortifying! This girl was wearing the exact same dress I was!"  Instead of saying, 'exactly the same dress', or just 'the same dress'.

'Exact same' sounds crazy and wrong to me.  Not that she shouldn't be mortified -- the other girl might look better in it -- but 'exact same' doesn't mean what the speaker things it does.

Why? Because 'same' means identical in every conceivable way, that you cannot ever distinguish a difference between two 'same' objects no matter what advanced technology or possible philosophical parsing you employ.  It's like saying '2 is the same as 2', an absolute identity.

'Exact', on the other hand, doesn't really express sameness.  It's synonymous with 'accurate' and 'precise'.  We use these three words to say how closely something adheres to a measurement or another thing or model, an approximation to some finite degree, however big or small, like a toy train compared to a real one, or a forged painting compared to the real masterpiece.

"That toy train looks exactly like the real thing!" "That forgery looks exactly like the original!"

But the toy train and the forgery are ultimately always found to be not the same as the original, even if they're exactly like the original, right? It's obvious with the toy train: it's a lot smaller.  But it's also obvious with the forgery if you have the right technology and experience to observe the minute differences.

So adding the word 'exact' to the word 'same' in the 'exact same' meme, dilutes the sameness of the comparison being made, it doesn't enhance it, because 'same' is the ultimate statement of identity between two ideas or objects, on which there is no possible improvement.

Some people seem to sense the craziness of this linguistic meme but attempt to fix it by getting rid of the wrong element, by chucking 'same' and saying, "This girl was wearing the exact dress I was!"

That totally has no meaning, dawg!  She (or he) is trying to talk about 'sameness' but has eliminated the only word in the meme that expresses sameness, leaving only the word that indicates approximation.

You wouldn't say, 'I was driving the exact car yesterday', would you?