Variety show
Sometimes the difference is obvious
IN ITS RECENT review of the Met's reopened Oceanic galleries, The
The Birmingham, England, Evening Mail bragged that the nearby National Exhibition Centre has interpreters who can welcome visitors "in seven different languages."
And last month, the Globe observed that pupils at Malden High School "hail from 80 different countries and speak 53 different languages." That was the "different" that caught the eye of reader Judi Chamberlin.
"What purpose does the word different serve in that sentence?" Chamberlin asked in an e-mail. "Could they possibly speak 53 of the same languages? Isn't '80 countries and 53 languages' sufficient?"
We all know the answer to her first question: Different is there to add emphasis, to punch up the numbers the writers want to highlight. The debate is about the final query: Is this different a redundancy? Should we feel guilty when we say "I phoned 15 different sources" or "it comes in 42 different flavors"?
Maybe, say the authorities; sometimes; a little; it depends.
The Columbia Guide to English Usage sums up the consensus: "Some will object...to the use of different to mean 'distinct,' as in I worked in three different restaurants.... They argue that different carries no semantic load here and merely contributes to wordiness." We should "limit it to Casual or other Conversational use." (And the same goes for three separate - use of separate "should be limited much as different should be.")
Bryan Garner, in Garner's Modern American Usage, tries to draw a brighter line under three different. "When following a number, different is sometimes a superfluity," he says. "Sometimes, however, the word different adds a desirable emphasis." Use it, he says, if you could comfortably substitute distinct.
So, you can use "53 different languages" when the emphasis is "desirable"? If this advice seems a bit squishy, there are good reasons. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this "weaker" sense of different - "denying identity, but without any implication of dissimilarity" - first saw print in 1651. The usage is also recorded in 1697 - "the many Different Senses such Words may bear" - and there's no shortage of later examples, like "so many different Sheets of Paper at once" (1705), or "eleven different languages" (1902).
Google's Book Search unearths, among other citations, a 1787 edition of "The Printer's Grammar," where we're instructed that in Chinese "one word often has more than twenty different significations." In all of the examples, the word different could be deleted without changing the sense.
Why, then, do writers regularly use the "extra" word? Because language isn't designed along minimalist principles. "Conciseness is a virtue," observed word maven James Kilpatrick, "but conciseness is not the only virtue." There's rhythm, weight, the need to give an audience extra clues; nape of the neck, Kilpatrick points out, is redundant - but only if all your readers know what a nape is.
The anti-redundancy campaign seems most vigorous in college writing guides, where it can be reduced to a simple list of things to avoid: At this point in time, free gift, plan ahead, safe haven. Some of these "redundancies" are highly debatable; 12 noon is normal English for almost everyone, and if you think "free gift" is redundant, you should treat yourself to Lewis Hyde's classic "The Gift," out next week in a new edition.
And even the redundancy police break the laws. Consider these uses of different:
"According to the writer's purpose, he may, as indicated above, relate the body of the paragraph to the topic sentence in one or more of several different ways."
"The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled."
The first comes from the original "Elements of Style," the 1918 handbook William Strunk printed up for his Cornell students. As generations of students have since learned, Strunk's rallying cry for writers was "Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!"
The second is from George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" - yes, the same 1946 essay in which he offered six rules for writers, including the one he ignores here: "If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out."
By all means, let's omit needless words. Plenty of writing is mindlessly, or even purposefully, wordy. It comes from students trying to stretch out essays, job seekers padding resumes, committees writing corporate mission statements - anywhere there's much ado about little.
But rooting around for the subtler redundancies is a misguided effort. The goal of language is not the most information in the smallest package - any more than the ideal dinner is a nutritionally perfect pill.
