Two-word tautologies

[MoleAtTheCounter]

Past history
Free gift
Aromatic smell
Mass exodus (a BBC favourite)

Please post more examples.

No matter how good the story teller, if you're reading, or hearing about someone else's experience it's not something you're experiencing. It's someone else's experience you're hearing or reading about.

I think that's a very narrow understanding of experience (and art as well). And would do away with the need for a word in our language like "vicarious."

Yes, you make a good point.

But I still contend that when talking about someone's experience it's generally assumed, unless the word vicarious is used in the same sentence, that an experience is something that someone has lived through themselves and therefore the word 'lived' is unnecessary and tautological.

Before ‘lived experience’, we had ‘direct experience’. I think that was a bit better.

Pre order is different to order, as it's not available yet...
Vbac after C-section.

PC computer

'unfilled vacancy'. I'm not in HR but I would assume this means it's gone through interview at least once to be unfilled.

Pre-prep school

Not quite what was asked for, but we're hearing a lot about 'biological sex' these days.

So what is non-biological sex? A person's sex is fixed at conception. There is no need to say biological sex.

Someone may feel they have a different 'gender' (for those who believe in gender).

But a person's sex is just their sex. 'Biological sex' really annoys me.

Biological sex as opposed to mind-blowing sex?

I suspect there are many technology acronyms like 'computer PC'. I offer ATM machine.

PC and ATM are abbreviations not acronyms.

PIN number

Also, thinking of this in with my old pensions actuary hat on:

• "My lived experience is that a lot of our pensioners have died this year" because three of my friends have died
• But the experience analysis shows that mortality was actually lower than expected - that person just had bad luck.

To me, lived experience denotes anecdata and an acknowledgement of that.

Isn’t that infants as opposed to 7 to 13?

I think we are getting closer to a meaning but ‘Lived experience’ just sounds wrong in that example.
I’d say it was something like the difference between witnessing crime and being the victim of it.
In the above example it doesn’t add anything.

They are both. All acronyms are abbreviations, but not all abbreviations are acronyms.

An abbreviation is a shortened form of a word, like Dr. for doctor or Jan. for January. An acronym is a shortened word of a phrase made up of the initial letters, and is pronounced as a single word, such as NATO for North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Doesn't this depend on what "prep" means in terms of what the preparation is for? It's a term of art meaning "prep" for secondary school (often "public" school) in the UK, right? In the US, "prep" school means prep for university, and prep schools are almost always private (the origin of clothing styles referred to as "preppy").

Very true!

As @WeWereInParis succinctly put it earlier in this discussion:

There can degrees of inaccuracy. To quote the Big Bang theory "It's a little wrong to say a tomato is a vegetable, it's very wrong to say it's a suspension bridge."

But in either case, I don’t think pre-prep is a tautology. It means a school for children younger than the intake of a preparatory school.
I have no experience of such institutions apart from driving past them, but I think they sometimes put age ranges on their signs.

Or at least, @CarolinaInTheMorning it should do. If you say it’s used interchangeably with prep school in the USA, I’ll take your word for it.

Surely, "My experience is that a lot of our pensions have died this year" is sufficient to show that you are talking about what you have experienced personally.

The word lived is unnecessary.

@MoleAtTheCounter , PC and ATM are not both. Abbreviations like NATO and RADAR are acronyms because you say them as nato and radar, not as N.A.T.O and R.A.D.A.R.

PAT testing
MOT test

@ShakeYourFeathers
PAT testing is Portable Appliance Testing testing
MOT testing is Ministry of Transport testing.

Some of the recent posts such as ATM machine are examples of RAS syndrome rather than two-word tautologies.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome

ATM and MOT are initialisms aren’t they? Not acronyms