02 October 2008

"The wrong place at the wrong time"

Is that phrase grammatically incorrect - or if not grammatically incorrect, is it logically incorrect? Here's the discussion, from The Atlantic's Word Court column:
"If a person is walking out of church on a Sunday morning and is struck by a meteorite and killed, I would say he was in the right place at the wrong time. Do you agree that oftentimes this phrase is applied incorrectly?”

...I agree with you that the wrong place at the wrong time is overused—even a cliché. It hasn’t been fresh since the middle of the Korean War, when General Omar Bradley said "... in the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, this strategy would involve us in the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.”

It’s true that any one of Bradley’s four wrong phrases would have made the same point—but less emphatically. Oddly, the two main ways to be forceful in English are to be succinct and to be wordy. The latter is out of fashion, and people who don’t like it call it redundancy. Those of us who do sometimes like it call it pleo­nasm: “the using of more words than are required to give the sense intended … often resorted to deliberately for rhetorical effect.”

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