Stress tests

Some pleonastic phrases are part of a language's idiom, like "safe haven" and "tuna fish" in English. They are so common that their use is unremarkable, although in many cases the redundancy can be dropped with no loss of meaning. Often, pleonasm is understood to mean a word or phrase which is useless, clichéd, or repetitive, but a pleonasm can also be simply an unremarkable use of idiom. It can even aid in achieving a specific linguistic effect, be it social, poetic, or literary. In particular, pleonasm sometimes serves the same function as rhetorical repetition — it can be used to reinforce an idea, contention or question, rendering writing clearer and easier to understand. Further, pleonasm can serve as a redundancy check by computer scientists to insure smooth transmission of data across a business network. And if a word is unknown, misunderstood, or misheard, or the medium of communication is poor — a wireless telephone connection or sloppy handwriting — pleonastic phrases can help ensure that the entire meaning gets across even if some of the words get lost.

So, why the foray into lingo-land? A couple of reasons, actually. First, I've recently finished reading an interesting book about teaching children faith, written by Arthur Henry King- an expert in language-detail research and teaching. Second, I've been pondering the meaning of the phrase "stress test". I'm not sure whether the phrase fully qualifies as a pleonasm but it certainly seems to contain two words which are at the same time useless, cliched and repetitive. And the phrase is used so frequently that it definitely can be considered common. And yet, underlying its use is a fertile ground of meaning. Images of tension, suffering, pressure and apprehension come to mind. Life, it seems, is basically a series or sequence of stress tests.

Some tests provide more stress than others, but all- by their very nature it seems- cause us to pause and consider how well prepared we are for their results. And pretty much every test does generate a result. When we say that we've failed a test or that the results of the test were abnormal then the stress seems to escalate. So perhaps the phrase should have the word "test" before the word "stress" since the former leads to the latter. But few people would have any idea what you were saying if you said you were about to take a "test stress". In fact, the simple reversal of the order actually seems to lessen the stress felt since it is the stress that's now being being tested (rather then the one who is taking the test feeling stressed).

Gratefully, when one passes a test or the results end up being normal then stress is usually relieved. If only we could tell going into a stress test that our stress would soon be relieved. However, that sort of outcome would require a different figure of speech. And some faith. Maybe even the faith like that described by Tennyson when he wrote that "[f]aith unfaithfully kept him falsely true." But that would be oxymoronic.