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SMART TALKSMART TALK SMART TALK
By Dr. Shirley Glibb

GREAT BIG: Descriptions such as great big, big huge, and great big gigantic are so obviously redundant as to seem no more worth complaining about than round circle. However, such juvenile speech can become a serious disease in later years.

At the Institute for the Linguistically Impaired, I sometimes find myself treating this particularly frustrating form of cerebroporosis. It seems most common in children, whom I don’t treat, but those whom their parents didn’t correct become my patients as adults.

The opposing redundancies are just as nasty to cure: little tiny, small little, and teeny tiny, as in teeny tiny little minds.

Sorry for that last, but hearing symptoms of cerebroporosis so often gives me a big headache.
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