RAS Syndrome
How many times in a day do we hear sentences, or say sentences like this?"There was a report about a thief in CNN news today. Early this morning, the thief hacked into an ATM machine and stole two thousand dollars by changing someone's personal PIN number. In the process, he was electrocuted and rendered unconscious by the AC current, which was leaked by the LCD display of the machine. When discovered, he was immediately sent to the nearest hospital. The police captured him when he regained consciousness three hours later. Upon interrogation, he admitted to have watched the Da Vinci code on DVD video earlier and learnt about the hacking of MS-DOS operating system. While the inspector became befuddled by the thief's ridiculous statement, the thief suddenly assaulted the inspector with a syringe and tried to escape. The experienced inspector successfully foiled the escape attempt by the foolish thief, however while struggling with the thief he was unfortunately stabbed by the syringe a few times on his body. To his horror, this syringe had been used on the thief beforehand and he claimed to be an AIDS patient. The unlucky inspector will have his blood tested in one month's time, and statistically, there is a 10% chance that he will be infected by the HIV virus."
Do you want to count the word count of repeated redundancy in the paragraph above? If you want to know more about what I am talking about, read more here in Wikipedia's article - RAS Syndrome. But if you want to be redundant, or doubly repeated, there is a funny (humorous) version in this funny article called "Redundancy".
Updated 8 October 2006:
1. CNN News: Cable Network News News
2. ATM Machine: Automatic Teller Machine Machine
3. Personal PIN Number: Personal Personal Identification Number Number
4. AC Current: Alternating Current Current
5. LCD Display: Liquid Crystal Display Display
6. MS-DOS Operating System: MicroSoft - Disk Operating System Operating System
7. HIV Virus: Human Immunodeficiency Virus Virus
8. Repeated Redundancy
9. Count the word count
10. RAS Syndrome: Redundant Acronym Syndrome Syndrome
11. Redundant, or double repeated
12. funny (humorous)
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6 comments:
how do you find out about all the nerdy stuff? there quite interesting tho :P
Haha, I was reading an online forum which was discussing how to "hack" an ATM Machine... Then someone kinda sarcastically said "hack into an ATM... machine... shakes head"... and then someone else replied... "you know, where you type in your PIN number". And so on...
It's funny, go and read the rest of the comments in the link above, that's how I got the realization of how often we use such language everyday.
This is interesting...
;)
RAS is indeed a prevalent syndrome. Sometimes it's so common that people don't bother to correct it, if not beginning to accept it.
Aihh.. next thing I know, you are gonna start corrrecting the RAS-like things in lectures, eih? Beware of becoming an RAS-nazi :S:S :P
day-dreamer: Haha, ya, it's kinda "nerdily" interesting...
Eric: Agreed! I guess most people would say ATM machine rather than ATM alone.
"Anonymous": Hahahaha, you learnt really fast worr... I am surprised that you remember about "language nazi" and stuff. Must be because I talk about it all the time :P :P
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