Dear editor,

To be less concise but more precise, perhaps I should write ``Mr. Executive Managing Director.’’ I do understand and appreciate your complaint about lack of concise expressions. Redundancies can grate on the nerves. But I wonder where English literature would be if Shakespeare had been told by his editors to be more concise.

Quite often conciseness limits us because, although we want to be precise in clarity of expression, we do not want to be boring or dull in our language. So instead of just using another word, we want to offer emphasis, for example on ``very’’ in ``very near future’’ and not ``distant future.’’ So sometimes it's repetitive to stress a point.

Sometimes redundancy is used to explain our tone or intentional nuance in a conversation, being that we want or should be subtle in our communicating with another (person).

Yes, sometimes we are verbose, because we can be. Sometimes we want to be vague, deliberately, or just stretching (out) an expression gives it (us) more style or panache. For example, "How to Read The Korea Times" might have been "Reading The Korea Times" but we understand the stress was on 'How', even if it may not have been necessary.

Finally, I remember in one of my classes discussing the significance of ``the people make the language,’’ being more relative than the other way around.

Fortunately, like the differences between ``letter of the law’’ and ``spirit of the law,’’ redundancies have more to do with colloquialisms. Or more precisely, one may use them in speaking (imprecisely), but not in writing (concisely).