Flagrantly bad English along with extreme cases of wordiness

[Joe Carillo]

If you are correct, maxsims, then I must be mistaken in my understanding that “redundancy” and “tautology” are synonymous. Maybe Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus, Third Edition, and my Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary must not have been doing their job right, too!

Simply for the record:

Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus, Third Edition

redundancy
Part of Speech: noun
Definition: repetition

Synonyms:
attrition, circumlocution, copiosity, macrology, overabundance, periphrasis, pleonasm, profusion, prolixity, superabundance, supererogation, superfluity, tautology, verbiage, verboseness, verbosity

Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary
tautology
Function: noun
Inflected Form: plural -gies
Etymology: Late Latin tautologia, from Greek, from tautologos
Date: 1574

1 a : needless repetition of an idea, statement, or word  b : an instance of tautology
2 : a tautologous statement

redundancy
Function: noun
Inflected Form: plural -cies
Date: circa 1602

1 a : the quality or state of being redundant  : SUPERFLUITY  b : the use of redundant components;  also   : such components  c chiefly British   : dismissal from a job especially by layoff
2 : PROFUSION, ABUNDANCE
3 a : superfluous repetition  : PROLIXITY  b : an act or instance of needless repetition
4 : the part of a message that can be eliminated without loss of essential information

***
I rest my case.

[maxsims]

Joe Carillo, you rest your case on shaky foundations.   Perhaps you should review the meaning of "synonymous".   From your Merriam-Webster, we have:

Main Entry: syn·o·nym
Pronunciation: \ˈsi-nə-ˌnim\
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English sinonyme, from Latin synonymum, from Greek synōnymon, from neuter of synōnymos synonymous, from syn- + onyma name — more at name
Date: 15th century

1 : one of two or more words or expressions of the same language that have the same or nearly the same meaning in some or all senses.

Note the phrase, "the same or nearly the same".

But to return to the question that you didn't answer:

Your cartoon has "hallmark feature" as a redundancy.

Definition 4 says a redundancy is that part of a message that can be eliminated without loss of essential information.

So, if you eliminate "hallmark feature" from the statement, does it still make sense?

I'll answer it for you.

NO.

[Joe Carillo]

I’m really surprised that we’re still at it about “hallmark feature” as a redundancy, or, as you insist, as a tautology. I actually rested my case on the fact that a “redundancy,” by definition, can be the redundant phrase or expression as a whole or any part of that phrase or expression that’s redundant. Is this distinction that hard to grasp? And for the life of me, I never suggested eliminating “hallmark feature” from the statement. In my critique of the redundant usage in that newspaper editorial, in fact, I suggested dropping the word “feature” as the less substantial lexical element and retaining “hallmark” as the more substantial defining element: “The hallmark of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is impaired social interactions.” So I wonder why you are insisting that I advocated eliminating the entire phrase “hallmark feature” from the sentence. I therefore suspect that you’ve just missed or misread my critique. That can happen to anyone, of course, so I perfectly understand your apparent misappreciation of the semantics here.

[maxsims]

Stop shifting the goalposts, Joe Carillo.  (You're not kin to Renz, are you?  )

If you read my posts carefully, you will not see anywhere that I even remotely suggested, let alone insisted, that you advocated eliminating "hallmark feature" from the sentence.   What I am suggesting - nay, insisting - is that:

it is you who maintains that "hallmark feature" is a redundancy;

It is you who is relying upon Merriam-Webster's definition of "redundancy"; and

it is you who refuses to answer the simple question: what happens to the sense of the sentence if you remove your redundancy?

(By the way, I didn't insist that "hallmark feature" is a tautology; I simply agreed that it is.)