The wonderful world of self-tautology

I've always loved words; what they mean and where they come from. I love that wonderful phrase etym dub, posh dictionary-speak for: We don't know where it comes from either. I always wanted to call a band Etym Dub but wasn't sure whether I wanted it to be forced to play reggae. I eventually called one of my poems Etym Dub; it's fairly barmy.

I used the word cataclysmic for the first time last night. What is a clysm anyway? And does it need a cat? Is it no fun by itself? Not all of us have cats. Apparently it's connected with great floods, which I figure rules out cats altogether.

It worries me that, in reporting the demise of my Peugeot 106, by fire if not the sword, that I may have committed a tautology with the phrase "cataclysmic flood". Actually it was a seriously impressive flood, well worth an emphatic tautology, but I don't like to be caught out this way. It serves me right for not knowing what the word means. For a long time I didn't know what autodidact meant, but that's self-tautology.

Some words seem wilfully obscure. I discovered that the French phrase a priori translates as the English phrase a priori; I have to admit that even after looking it up, I'm not a lot the wiser.

PD James adores the words hieratic and atavistic. She cannot resist using them at the drop of a Dalgleish. These days I'm vaguely aware that one is to do with sacred ritual and the other is about genetic throwbacks. However I can never remember this when I'm reading PD James, and when I eventually remember to look them up in a dictionary, I can no longer remember why she used them or when.

Still, who am I to criticise the venerable mistress of the It Doesn't Matter Who Did It? She writes such exquisite English that the identity of the murderer has been rendered entirely unimportant. Perhaps one day crime novel fans will worry again about such things. Positively atavistic.