Why do people say...?

Stop Redundancy

"The Committee for the Reduction of Redundancy and the Antiproliferation of Repetition has decided not to meet until they have their first meeting and thus will not be meeting until the first time.

Their Pre-meeting Statement wanted to make this clear before they had their first meeting, so that it would not be more confusing.

So their first meeting will actually be their first meeting and they will not have a meeting before the first meeting.

This should avoid having people show up for their first meeting before it is held, since to do so would be confusing to those who did so and this is what they want to avoid by reducing the confusion and lessening the repetition."

You may be onto something. We should report it to the Department of Redundancy Department.

At least with PIN they have the excuse of avoiding confusion with all of the other meanings of "pin." A hatpin, for instance, would probably jam an ATM and some people are that literal minded. Like the Apocryphal story of the guy who was asked for a "Stool Sample"--and broke the back off a chair.

For the same reason that people say WMDs when the "W" is already plural, so they're saying Weapons of Mass Destructions (which I suppose does sort of have meaning, but...). It seems, as a general rule of thumb, that when an expression is abbreviated, it sort of takes on a life of its own, "becoming" an adjective (in the case of ATM and PIN) and singular (in the case of WMD).

The abbreviation is so prevalent that we forget what it actually stands for. It's not surprising, really.

I am always mildly annoyed by people saying Interact for Interac (which is the system for using a debit card in a store in Canada). Most people don't pay attention to the fact that it isn't spelled with a "t". C'est la vie!

This drives me crazy! I hate the redundancy. The worst one is "Suicide bomber blows self up!"

People do this because they just don't think before they speak.

i think people are just generally stupid about things like that. I found your post very funny. thanx thanx :)

mostly because the people who say it wrong believe in god, if you dont believe in god your much more likely to do things correctly