Last week, a Twitter user lamented the poor use of English by Nigerians. In her words, “It’s dinner not dinner night okay??? You can’t have breakfast morning or lunch afternoon nah. I get that it’s a function but it’s dinner regardless.”
Using “dinner night” is a case of redundancy in English. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary defines redundancy as “an act or instance of needless repetition.” Since “dinner” is usually eaten at night, it is needless to say or write “dinner night”.
Put differently, Britannica Dictionary explains redundancy as the act of using a word, phrase, etc., that repeats something else and is therefore unnecessary.
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In response to her comment, I wrote: “what about people who say or write “short knickers”, “wake keep”, “reverse back”, “ATM machine” instead of “knickers”, “wake”, “reverse” and “ATM”? Lol.”
The standard forms in English are ‘knickers’, ‘reverse’, ‘ATM’, and ‘wake’.
One of the other instances of redundancy to avoid is saying ‘transport fare’ instead of the standard form ‘fare’.
A fare is the money that you pay for a journey that you make, for example, in a bus, train, or taxi. So, you can talk about *taxi fare*, *air fare*, *train fare*, but transport fare is redundant.
Lastly, you should stop saying or writing ‘instructional manual. The standard phrase is ‘instruction manual’ or just ‘manual.
A manual is a book which tells you how to do something or how a piece of machinery works.
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