Abbreviations are a good source of pleonasms. Unfortunately, these aren't the kind that make you sound literary, these are the kind that make you sound dumb to people who know better. Here are some examples of common gaffes:
- ATM machine
- Automatic Teller Machine machine
- PIN number
- Personal Identification Number number
- CAD design
- Computer Aided Design design
- SCUBA gear
- Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus gear
- ISBN number
- International Standard Book Number number
- LCD display
- Liquid Crystal Display display
- MIDI interface
- Musical Instrument Digital Interface interface
- GUI interface1
- Graphical User Interface interface
There are also a number of borderline pleonasms that come up when foreign language words get transplanted. Since the meanings of the words are not generally know to the users, it's debatable at to whether they're really redundant. Here are some examples of this:
- minestrone soup
- soup soup
- Rio Grande river
- river big river
- The La Brea Tar Pits
- the the tar tar pits
- Sahara desert
- desert desert
- Mount Fujiyama
- mount fuji mountain
Of course, there are other redundant pleonasms, but when you yourself are writing in a literary context or participating in spoken discourse it can be impossibly difficult to say whether you are attempting to try for strengthened emphasis, or if you're just a stupid idiot.
- I actually got called on this one while making a presentation about a program I had written. I felt very stupid.