Evolutionary, Not Revolutionary

Take a look at this article. And this one. And this one. And this one. And this one.

The common thread is this: the authors are all from the venerable http://www.anandtech.com tech news/reviews website, and they all express themselves with the play on the words “evolutionary” and “revolutionary.”

Oh, kill me now.

When I first encountered this combination of words some years ago (from Anandtech), I thought, “Ha, that’s cute — but is it really necessary to use two six-syllable words to convey that idea? Can’t they just say that the product is or is not very, oh I don’t know — innovative?” It just seems a little bit stupid to work the reader through the hurdles of e-vo-lu-tion-ar-y and re-vo-lu-tion-ar-y. Certainly, it doesn’t look, or sound, very intelligent either as far as the author(s) are concerned.

Besides, it’s not a case where one word out of the pair is confused for the other. Stylistically, that’s when such combinations really shine. For example — “apposite” vs “opposite”. The two are completely different in meaning (almost antonyms, really), and are sometimes confused to mean the other because of their 1-vowel difference. Another such pair is “accept” and “except.” And maybe even “accrete” and “accrue.” But evolutionary and revolutionary, when used together in the sense of “hey, reader, check this out,” is just annoying. And it’s moronic if you keep repeating it over and over again, like the folks at Anandtech. Lastly, it gets a little bit retarded if you keep mentioning the same pair to say the same message every time — that it’s evolutionary, not revolutionary (and never the other way around).

UPDATE August 27, 2008: OK, I just realized now that Anandtech isn’t the only source of the horrible wordplay. Google evolutionary “not revolutionary” and see for yourself.