Redundancy Found, Even Among the Best of Us

Ward Chamberlain, a veteran of the Second World War of the last century, was being interviewed in Ken Burns' epic production surveying the great tragedy. Mr. Chamberlain was recounting the terrible Allied losses as they pushed back toward Rome Benito Mussolini's Italian army and the Germans.

"We lost an awful lot of casualties," he said. A "loss" or a soldier "lost" in this context means the same thing as a "casualty," which means "a person killed or injured."

Workable options include: "We suffered a lot of casualties," "We sustained a lot of casualties," "We lost an awful lot of men." A verb substitute would have worked in which the verb means something different from "casualty" but nevertheless works together with it as an unambiguous transitive verb transferring a notion logically consistent with its object. If you "lose a casualty," the redundancy results in an ambiguity, a "lost loss." Losing bodies probably had occurred, but this is not what Mr. Chamberlain had intended to convey.

The purpose here is not to distract from a dramatic moment or from a decent, educated man talking solemnly of a most tragic time in history, but to take the opportunity to point out that a missed point of grammar could result in unintended confusion.