The truth: Don't ignore prejudices!

“The waiter nodded with his own head” – Ernest Hemingway achieved this exact observation with his own eyes, according to the translator of his autobiographically based novel “Fiesta” Annemarie Horschitz-Horst. Many journalists also use their own heads, as they form “the central hub” (ZDF info) between politics and the public and have a “huge, mammoth task” (3sat) in front of them every day.

Tautologies are not superfluous, as an arrogant and “lousy bastard” (feature film “Knives Out”) might think! They serve as a kind of flavor enhancer, as a booster, so that no “bad stroke of fate” (ZDF) that has struck a celebrity is immediately forgotten by the citizens or they even “ignore it away” (ARD).

Pleonasms simply have “positive advantages”. They even serve education, as the example of the “Jewish Rabbi” (DLF) makes clear: Helpful duplications like these expand knowledge of the world or bring buried knowledge back to life and, since German humanity has been getting dumber and dumber for 25 years, as shown by the Pisa studies, should in future also make the Christian pastor and the Islamic imam better recognizable in view of population change; not to forget the Roman Catholic Pope for the time being.

There is a second argument in favor of double-crossing: that the meaning of the individual word gets lost in the sea of ​​public and private chatter, chatter and chatter. As demonstrated, the adjective promises salvation. However, this has its own completely different pitfalls: They become apparent when a “moody, commented headline” (Titanic online) is published and “a moving speech” (taz) is reported, but “debates about which disasters receive how much attention are always somewhat tolerable” (taz), while the police always think of their “employees who walk through the city by hand” (ARD) - a discipline for the Olympic Games of tomorrow?

In tautology, one word fits too much too well, but here the sentence wobbles and has air. You know what is meant when the “withdrawal of a law” (taz) is called for, the message comes from Washington: “Merz is flattering Trump – and vice versa” (Stuttgarter Zeitung), and the trade magazine is happy about “the full audience” (chess) at a tournament, even if it is a message from the upside down world in which chairs apparently sit on people.

Impossible? Not in the media world! “Many delegates have partially left” (NDR3), one marvels at a climate conference, and experiencing an artist “in his increasingly rare appearances” (taz) is “perhaps anyway” (Göttinger Tageblatt) worse or better than waiting for his increasingly frequent appearances. It becomes similarly ambivalent when a director "want[s] an environment that is authentic. So we decided to build the set in the studio." (taz)

It is possible that the word has changed its meaning and something is already considered authentic if it only feigns authenticity but is not real. You can't be picky. “Mobile advice against the right, psychosocial help for refugees, political education – many of these structures are in danger of disappearing,” complains the taz. The complaint is justified, but: Are advice, help and education structures and not topics, content, i.e. offers?

However, what would life be without mistakes: correct and boring! Man is not a machine, but rather a mistake in evolution: to err is human, and humans are insane. In Putin's Russia, especially the judges and prosecutors, because there the historian Yuri Dmitriyev was "sentenced on fictitious charges of child pornography" (taz).

It's not perverse, but it's the wrong way around in Germany, where the Weser-Kurier reports on its editor-in-chief: "Board member David Koopmann recognizes the journalist's merits (!), which can hardly be underestimated."

With which the gloss, for which not a single “invented misquote” had to be conjured up, moved from the somehow coherent tautology to the wrong word to the false paradox. Was that useless, is the author himself just a “ridiculous joker” (taz), or will his criticism go down as an “important milestone” (Arte) in journalism and linguistic history, in short: “an enormous breakthrough” (ZDF neo)?

Please use your own head to find the answer!