Previous Trope Repair Shop thread: Needs Help
, started by Korados on Aug 15th 2019 at 7:50:04 PM
To be fair, an Automated Teller Machine Machine could be a machine that makes Automated Teller Machines. And an Automated Teller Machine Machine Machine is a machine that makes machines that make Automated Teller Machines, and so on... add machine ad infinitum.
Edited by VectorFluxion
Is it just me, or do a lot of the examples look like they should be in Department of Redundancy Department?
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I'm not even sure I see why this should be its own trope, the whole thing seems kind of- Oh. Now I see.
Yeah, I'm not sure what the difference is.
EDIT: Reread the description, and realized they're unrelated.
Edited by ading I'm a Troper!!!
Does anyone know why it's being used like DORD?
Seven barrels of Laser Death.
It seems like a Super-Trope. Could be wrong on that though.
I'm a Troper!!!
I think the difference between Department of Redundancy Department and Shaped Like Itself should be mentioned in trope description. I can well understand why these tropes get mixed, although the difference is clear:
DORD:
"Alice is a female girl of the feminine gender"
Shaped like itself:
"Alice looks just like Alice!"
Edited by Jusamies In porto perse vitulus est.
All you people 7 years ago seem to have come to a consensus about the difference between the tropes, to the degree that I almost feel like you're trolling me with "yeah they look the same - oh now I see it" with no further explanation.
I agree that "female feminine girl" should fall under dord and not this trope. But that is NOT what the description says, which immediately uses "free gratis" as an example. The description still makes a joking reference to DORD with no clarification about the difference. Tautology is a synonym of redundancy in general usage.
Gonna start a newer thread to discuss further.
Would that famous definition of pornography/obscenity ("I know it when I see it") be an example of this trope?
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For the record, that example IS listed in the Real Life page for this trope.
It's a better example than 90% of the others here for what it's worth. Most of these are indistinguishable from a Department of Redundancy Department example. That one at least is a statement meaning "pornography is defined as what I see as pornography", following the usage if not the exact phrasing of the trope namer.
IMO this one is in serious Trope Decay and needs some repair.
I'm wondering if 'free gratis' is a good example. There is after all 'libre' which isn't the same thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre
It's not a great example, but it is still redundant if "gratis" is simply one of several types of "free". It'd be like saying "chihuahua dog".
That kind of example really shouldn't count anyway in my opinion. We already have the Department of Redundancy Department.
Edit: Although as I have just had to painstakingly research, that trope is intended to be just for things with literal repetition, even though many other things could be called redundant; whereas this trope is actually the one for general redundancy, even though the name implies a much more specific kind of turn of phrase. Bleh!
Edited by jerodast
. . . isn't the Willy Wonka quote about wallpaper? Like, when you lick the picture of the snozzberry on the wallpaper, it tastes like a real snozzberry, as opposed to, say, artificial flavoring, or just paper? Or something like that.
I made this Idolized Julius Kingsley icon back when Akito first came out, and now that the crossover is actually happening, I don't care. Hide / Show Replies
Yeah...people forget he also says "the oranges taste like oranges" and nobody bats an eye at that, because he clearly means "the oranges [on the wall] taste like orange [fruits]". He's even asked "what's a snozzberry?" and he does NOT answer "it tastes like a snozzberry". Bad example, tear it down!
- In the romantic comedy Intolerable Cruelty, the main character is a member of the National Organization of Marital Attorneys, Nationwide (in other words, he's a divorce lawyer). This is for no other reason than for the organization to have the acronym N.O.M.A.N.. The organization's motto is "Let N.O.M.A.N. put asunder."
I'm trying to figure out how this is an example . . .
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National/Nationwide.
I made this Idolized Julius Kingsley icon back when Akito first came out, and now that the crossover is actually happening, I don't care.
Removing this example from the Music section:
- In the song "Africa" by Toto, we are told that "Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus." Comparing a mountain to a mountain.
The line isn't "Kilimanjaro rises like a mountain," which would be an example of this trope. It's comparing Kilimanjaro to one specific mountain, namely Olympus, so it doesn't fit this trope. "Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus" means it's not rising like Everest, or like Denali, or like Mauna Kea.
Lord
I removed these because they are just apt descriptive names, not actually redundant. It's like saying "brown dog" is redundant because it describes a brown dog. These would only make sense if they were something like (e.g.) "the electron-moving electromotive force", "the onion tear-inductive lacrimony factor".
- In a battery, the force that causes electrons to move is known as the 'electromotive force', which means 'the force that causes electrons to move'.
- Similar to the above example, the thing about onions that makes you cry is called the 'onion lacrimatory factor', which means 'the thing about onions that makes you cry'.
- A 'dental fricative' letter sound is one that causes your teeth to wobble or rub together as you say it, which is pretty much exactly what the phrase 'dental fricative' means.
A number of examples on this page are wrong, with previous editors mistaking clarification and slight semantic differences for repetition. If I were to delete or change them all myself, the page would be significantly shorter and my edit would probably be reverted by some well-meaning person who didn't bother to read it through. What should be done?
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Put an explanatory edit reason in. And make sure that they are actually wrong. I didn't notice anything bad there.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
In the quote from Antony And Cleopatra, the link to Crocodile Tears in Antony's last line seems like a bit of a sinkhole to me. The trope being linked to is about fake tears, and the pothole text is just about a crocodile's tears.
Basically, it seems like either an unrelated tidbit about beliefs about crocodiles being tossed in, or like the link was put in just because the name of the trope sounded relevant to the line, and not because the trope had anything to do with the line being used as the link.
Maybe I'm missing something, as my memories of the play the quote is from aren't that clear. Thoughts?
In Lexx 1.2 Super Nova, they meet a hologram named Poet Man.
Stan: Who's he? Kai: Poet Man. Stan: Who's Poet Man? Kai: A poet man.
While the xkcd picture is funny, I don't think it's completely representative of the page.
In a very xkcd'ish fashion it presents a funny mathematical dilemma: How to draw a pie chart when the pie chart itself affects its own shape? (In other words, if you are making a pie chart representing how much the image is covered by white and how much with black, the pie chart itself affects the result. How do you calculate the correct portion?)
However, while a clever picture, I'm not sure this is a good representative of "shaped like itself".
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True. The value of black goes up with the text, borders and whatnot being black, and so the amount of black part goes up, which further increases the amount of black. It's not really a tautology.
Image Pickin thread opened.
Yeah, unwritten rule number one: follow all the unwritten procedures. - Camacan
Not sure if this belongs here or not. One thing that irritates me is the tendency to have labelling on a product that says, "12 ounces. 20% larger! than our 10 ounce size."
It's actually 3 labels. The "12 ounces" is the actual size of the product. "20% larger!" is written in huge letters, and "...than our 10 ounce size" is written very small directly underneath it. But when you string them together as I did above, the result is... well, duh.
- Questionable Content has this exchange between Faye and Raven.
Faye: "Raven, do you ever feel even the slightest urge to listen to music that hasn't been hand-fed to you by MTV or Clear Channel?"Raven: "I don't really know what you mean. I just like the stuff I hear on the radio."
- How is this redundant?
Deleted "How is this redundant?" I figured just nukin' it didn't seem fair, so I put it here since the question should have been asked on the discussion page to begin with.
As for why I deleted it, Raven doesn't seem to be the sort to listen to NPR much. Which, if one is still too lazy to look up Clear Channel, means she almost certainly either listens to Clear Channel or thinks static is music, since they live in the United States. (Although if they live close enough to the Canadian border, they might get some CHUM Radio channels.)
Edited by RealSlimShadowen Hide / Show Replies
That still doesn't explain how "I just like the stuff I hear on the radio" is a tautology. Note that for it to be a valid example it would have to be literally inconceivable in practice or in theory for the statement to be false.
Edited by 99.254.158.95 I'm a Troper!!!
This seems similar to Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
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Exactly What It Says on the Tin is when a work's name tells you exactly what the work is about.
Shaped Like Itself is about a statement that is true by nature, i.e., "it is shaped like itself."
Not sure how they're similar.
Edited by ading I'm a Troper!!!
"The following message is a message from the DORD Department." I thought "dord" meant "density".
hi, i came to mention that the recursive acronym ZWEI works as well with english numbering, though perhaps not as precisely. two was one once, making the acronym TWOO.
As it currently stands, Shaped Like Itself is just a pointless clone of Department of Redundancy Department. And while it's kindof hilariously meta that we have redundant tropes about redundancy, I don't think the joke is supposed to go quite that far, at least not in the main pages.
The proper definition of Shaped Like Itself is clearly suggested by the title and the page quote: It's a truthful statement with zero informational content. A statement with zero information is different from a statement that repeats itself. Consider these three sentences:
1. The crocodile is its own color
2. The crocodile is green, for green is its color.
3. The crocodile is green.
Sentence 1 fits under Shaped Like Itself, because at the end of the sentence you still have no idea what color the crocodile is.
Sentence 2 does not fall under Shaped Like Itself, but rather falls under Department of Redundancy Department, because at the end of the sentence you do know the color of the crocodile, it's just that you were needlessly told this same fact twice in quick succession.
Sentence 3 isn't a trope at all; it's just a simple statement.
As it stands, the Shaped Like Itself description is hopelessly muddled. Right from the opening we have this: "To say that a thing is shaped like itself is a tautology, a truthful phrase with no informational content, an unnecessary repetition of words meaning the same thing: "Free gratis" "
"A truthful phrase with no informational content" fits Sentence 1 above, but "an unnecessary repetition of words meaning the same thing" is just Department of Redundancy Department, because actual meaning is conveyed. "Free gratis" is just Dord; it's not an example of Shaped Like Itself.
Even the page pic is a bad fit. A graph that tells you the amount of black "in this image" is oddly recursive, and it's rather redundant in telling you something that you could just as easily estimate for yourself (since you're already looking at the image, obviously), but it's still saying something. A better XCKD pic would be the one with the line "The First Rule of Tautology Club is The First Rule of Tautology Club".
Speaking of which, I think we're misled by the word "tautology". The word has multiple definitions. One definition matches Sentence 2 above and Department of Redundancy Department, but another definition matches Sentence 1 above and Shaped Like Itself. If we're going to use the word "tautology" to describe either trope, we should clarify this point.
Anyway, some of the listed examples fit with the trope (as I understand it) and some don't. I'm guessing one reason we haven't fixed this is that there are a lot of examples and it would be a huge hassle to go through them all.
Edited by sonicsuns3