Im Anfang war die Tat

There's a surprisingly lucid discussion in Gadjo Dilo's Transylvanian keep about tautology.

The issue seems to be whether such verbal redundancy is a sign of ignorance or the sort of speech defect that my father used to cure with a Lada battery and a gasmask.

No Good Boyo and his compatriot Sioba Siencyn - a professional moss-gatherer, I believe - have claimed a particular school of tautology for their pixie patrimony.

These "Welshisms", as they call them during mercifully infrequent forays into English, are marked by a florid declamatory style, often involving auxesis.

Examples they have shared with me include:

a police officer on the Radio 4 "Today" programme saying that the then-flooded village of Crickhowell was "an island, an island surrounded by water";

Mervyn Johns in the film Dead of Night referring to "a nightmare of horror";

another Welsh film character at some point bewailing a "hollow mockery"; and

a Cambrian colleague of Boyo's once causing a mass choking fit in London curryhouse by mentioning a "diametrically opposed opposite".

Anyone who has found themselves suddenly overwhelmed by a Welsh social gathering will notice that repetition is a national identifier both in speech and clothing - belts worn with braces (meaning "suspenders" for my American readers - Welsh denistry is a stranger to tools other than the pick and shovel) , cardigans with jackets and, among the ladies, wigs with hats.

The question to my mind is this: are these true tautological statements, or simply the cotton-gin mechanisms of the Welsh language as applied to the sleek machinery of modern English?