Does redundancy constitute bad grammar? [View all]

[Lionel Mandrake]

This is a question about style, or prescriptive grammar, not about linguistics.

TV Westerns used to have theme songs. One of them started as follows:

"Wyatt Earp, Wyatt Earp;
Brave, courageous, and bold ..."

Song lyrics are poetry. This example is bad poetry IMHO, because it's so redundant.

Here's a subtler example: when I hear someone say "warm temperature", it bothers me. I'd prefer to hear about "high temperature" or "warm weather". Since "warm" has the idea of temperature built into it, "warm temperature" strikes me as slightly redundant.

Redundancy is a vice in English, but it's a virtue in some other languages. "No sé nada" and "Je ne sais rien" are acceptable, but "I don't know nothing" isn't. As the Germans say: andere Leute, andere Sitten.