The department of redundancy department
SOME of you have been kind enough to suggest that this column performs a service to humanity. I hope it’s not the sort of service provided by Cape Town waiters, or by employees of my mobile phone company, which oscillates between slow, incomprehensible, appalling and non-existent.
Speaking of service, reader Neville Barber pointed out a common language error we hear almost every day: “It seems trendy to talk these days about ‘service delivery’,” he wrote. “Service means ‘provision of assistance or advice’. Why now does one have to deliver provision of assistance? Is it not self-evident that there is no service unless it’s delivered?”
He’s right. The delivery of service is a service, in the same way as the delivery of a plate of soup is a service. You might as well say “service service”. (Do waiters on a cruise ship provide surface service, I wonder?)
Service, a noun dating back to the 12th century, comes from the same root as slavery and originally referred only to a church service. Later it was extended to tea, the military, garbage collection, tennis, and almost anything you care to name.
It became a back-formed verb in around 1926. You can, should you wish to, service a car or a debt, but be careful when telling someone you’ve just been out to service a client, particularly if you look a bit dishevelled when you return.
Isn’t it odd that in a world obsessed with shortcuts, acronyms and abbreviations, we perversely burden ourselves with longer words or phrases, where short ones would suffice?
There is no need, for example, to say “personal belongings”, “past experience”, “future plans” or “a small minority”. If it belongs to you, it’s personal. If you’ve experienced it, it must have been in the past. If you’re planning something it must be going to happen in the future, and if it is a minority, it is by nature small.
Another annoying one is “the very beginning”. What other kind of beginning is there? Maybe there’s a pre-school for beginnings that no one’s told me about. In the same vein, “exactly the same” means exactly the same thing as “the same”.
An “added bonus” is simply a bonus, nothing more and nothing less. In music, a “live recording” is just a recording (unless you’re a pirate).
Why we don’t lose these tautologies is an unsolved mystery. Or just a mystery. We’d save so much time and finger-effort if we lopped all the unnecessary words out of our written and spoken conversation. In the (exact) same way, we could use short words instead of long ones. Serve is a perfectly serviceable word and a whole syllable shorter than service. Why not use it?
Bob Dylan, master lyricist and provider of service to humanity, knew this when he wrote the song Gotta Serve Somebody. Serve, not service. Well done, Bob. Now if only someone had told you that gotta is not a word.