I caught myself in a tautonym!

Feb 21, 2008 at 6:59 PM
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Today I caght myself mid sentence in a tautonym. Although redundance is old news for our class, I still wanted to share this common example. As we all know there was an ice storm passing through today, well earlier this afternoon I asked someone this question: "Is it snowing outside?" After I thought about what I had just said, I realized that it couldn't snow anywhere else but "outside". We use this phrase often though when speaking of weather even though the meaning "outside" is implicit when we are talking about weather. I don't feel comfortable dropping off the outside, so I will just be redundant from now on. It's okay as long as I know I'm not correct, right?

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[this is good]

i thought this was funny--i'm actually taking french 101 right now and we just learned weather phrases and you use different verb forms with different weather conditions just because they are phrases (il fait beau, il y a brouillard, il fait du soleil)-- i would totally say it's raining/snowing outside... i guess because inside it's usually nice compared to the constantly changing weather.

I laughed too because I use redundant phrases like that too all the time. In American Sign Language you most likely wouldn't include the "outside" modifier either because your right, where else besides outside can it snow? You might establish that you are outside doing something and it happened to snow while you were engaging in that activity but otherwise you would just sign "It's snowing"

I caught myself in a tautonym!

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