I love word facts nearly as much as I love food and I was very happy to see them deftly combined by Radio’s John Humphrys recently. He described tautology, the fashionable and pointless act of saying the same thing over again in different words, (safe haven, temper tantrum, past history) as:

The equivalent of having chips with rice

Brilliant!

Reminds me of my dad. He thinks a bowl of pasta is incomplete unless accompanied by chips and bread. The holy carb-umvirate.

He’s currently bordering on clinical obesity right now at this moment.