I have a nice anecdote about this which I allude to in a forthcoming post but that I’ve actually mentioned previously regarding the word chirality as it pertains to molecules. Put simply, it means handed, and even extending the definition to its full technical descriptor is unnecessary as the word is simply derived from the Greek for hand and actually means nothing more and nothing less than handedness regardless of the efforts to make it seem more sophisticated (in the strict sense of the word) than it really is.

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It’s redundant if you think, “HIV? What part of HIV? Oh, the virus. Wait, HIV told me that already.” It’s less so if you first say, “OK. We’re talking about a virus. Which virus? Oh, the HIV virus.” Yes, redundant, but it’s used because “HI Virus” tis not a familiar phrase and “Oh, HIV” assumes a little bit more knowledge on the reader’s part. Can you assume that your readers’ know that the V in HIV means virus? Late night TV shows get quite a bit of mileage out of asking people on the street, “what does the N in PIN stand for?” and chortling as they say, “PIN as in PIN number? Uh, I don’t know.”

It’s a fair bet that these days many people know of “HIV” as its own word (referring to some causative agent for AIDS) without knowing immediately off the top of their head that the V stands for virus. To those people, “HIV virus” is useful and informative.

So I think the complaint should not necessarily be that writers don’t know their topic, but that they are deliberately being redundant because doing so is the best way to ensure that information makes it from the writer’s head to the readers’. If I were less lazy, I’d do more than just allude to studies about natural languages’ usefulness due to the high degree of redundancy. :)

This is a problem that faces any kind of technical writing for a mass audience: translating from a highly precise jargon with low redundancy, to natural languages with low precision and high redundancy.

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R.