- By Jim Evans
- Entertainment
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SMART TALK SMART TALK By Dr. Shirley Glibb
DOOMED TO FAIL: Here at the Institute for English as a First Language, we often wonder why people seem to enjoy misery. To do so seems perverse to us.
Misery makes me miserable, not happy, and I don't like to dwell on it. That's why I say doomed and not doomed to fail. Why drag it out, especially with a redundancy, which is bad usage? We like to tell patients, “That’s twice as sad, and twice as bad."
Of course, doomed to failure is the same mistake. Double verb redundancies belong in a class by themselves. Imagine saying try to attempt, or drop and descend. Doesn’t that sound foolish?
Lawyers commit this type of foolishness all the time with boners like cease and desist instead of stop. But then, at the hourly rates some of them charge, any extra word, however useless, is another dollar. That must be it. It can’t be fatuousness brought on by an overheated sense of self importance. The lawyers I know are very nice folks.
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