Here’s a rabbit hole I never thought I would find myself mucking around in: trying to distinguish among all of the ways we label “obvious and unnecessary” repetition. Down in the hole, I found plain old “repetition,” but then there were “truism,” “tautology,” “pleonasm,” and “redundancy,” the last of which is the reason I had gone down there. I discovered that various sources, Internet and hard-bound, define these terms in circles, and then seem to give up by claiming them all “synonymous” with one or more of the others. Except some are longer.

So I propose:

that the word “repetition” be the universe of “obvious and unnecessary” and include all forms of saying the same thing twice. In this sense, a paragraph could be “repetitious,” and so could a word.

This means that a “truism” would be “obvious and unnecessary,” but only after so many millions of other people had used the same words to repeat the same “obvious and unnecessary” point, that it had become cliché, like, “What goes up must come down.”

A “tautology” then would be “obvious and unnecessary,” kind of like a “truism,” but in a fresh, creative way, as in, “If he hadn’t been carrying a gun, he never would have shot Milt.”

“Pleonasm” I suggest we give to the doctors, because it sounds medical, and it seems serious. Let them deal with it.

So, the tiniest category of “obvious and unnecessary” I have reserved for “redundancy,” which would be any word that repeats the essence of the word it modifies. This final category would comprise only the word pairings we write to clients, judges, and colleagues, while our minds are fully engaged elsewhere:

Alice likes the proposal.