| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. |
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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2. Style: Parallelism, Passives, Redundancy, and Wordiness
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| § 22. old adage |
| It is sometimes claimed that the expression old adage is redundant, inasmuch as a saying must have a certain tradition behind it to count as an adage in the first place. But the word adage is first recorded in the phrase old adage, showing that this redundancy itself is very old. A similar redundant phrase is young whelp. | 1 |
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| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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