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SMART TALKSMART TALK SMART TALK

by Dr. Thorn Schwa

FALSE PRETENSES: At the Center for English as a First Language, we love to use this redundancy to annoy each other at staff meetings or while joking around in the Fowler Lounge. It never fails to annoy, because we've heard it from patients until we want to throw things.

Imagine our self control when we remain calm and polite while in session instead of screaming, "It's a pretense! Hello? Isn't something you pretend by definition something false? Can you possibly have a true pretense?"

And where did the preposition come from? Under false pretenses? Why not in or on? And why the plural? How many pretenses can you have, for goodness sake? Try saying, for instance, "Senator Blowhard's argument was a pretense," or "His coming to me with that deal was a pretense." Or - brace yourself - you could say, "He wasn't being honest."

Look at that. The language is simpler. It's clearer. Simpler and clearer is always better. For proof of this maxim, see the opposite of simple and clear in most scholarly quarterlies, where the object is less sharing knowledge than obfuscation, the better to befuddle one's colleagues.



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