A listener named Tim wrote on Twitter that he had heard someone on NPR say that another person "often frequented” a venue, and Tom thought the phrase often frequented sounded redundant.
.@GrammarGirl HELP! I heard @NPR say someone "often frequented" a venue. Isn't that redundant? Sounds so to me, anyway.
— Tim Chambers (@tbc0) June 15, 2016
Technically, Tom is right. As a verb, to frequent means “to visit a place often,” so the word often is redundant. It would be more correct to say that someone frequented a location or visited a place often.
But I wouldn’t come down too hard on NPR because audio is different from text. People who are listening to the radio aren’t always paying as close attention as someone who is reading an article. Listeners are driving or they might have the radio on in their house or office as background while they’re doing other things, so it’s not unusual for people on the radio to say the same thing multiple times in different ways or to be redundant to make sure listeners get the point. Think of redundancy on the radio, such as often frequented, as being there for emphasis.
Related Articles
Are You Annoyingly Redundant?
When Is It OK to Be Redundant?
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
from Grammar Girl RSS
http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/is-redundancy-ok-in-a-radio-script
No comments:
Post a Comment