RAS SYNDROME

I can’t speak for anyone else but I sure have lost a couple hours of my life just reading through the various topics that one can find on Wikipedia. It’s interesting and you’re learning at the same time! How is that possible?

One topic I stumbled upon is called the “RAS syndrome“. The acronym stands for “Redundant Acronym Syndrome syndrome”. The syndrome occurs when a word in an acronym is used with the acronym in describing something. The most common example is the term “PIN number”. PIN stands for “Personal Identification Number” so appending the last “number” onto the term is redundant.

The fact that the term “RAS syndrome” self-references the problem has not been lost on the people who coined it. A list of terms which suffer from RAS is quite lengthy but here are a select few:

LCD display
ATM machine
DVD disc

The whole list can be found in the Wikipedia article.

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