Over and Over

Sometimes there's a fine line between style and a tin ear. Proving that a thesaurus is a dangerous weapon in the wrong hands, only a hack writer would use what Fowler called the elegant variation, in which, for fear of repeating himself, said hack replaces "elephant" with "pachyderm" and then "grey-skinned beast". On the other hand, if you unnecessarily use the same word more than once in too short a span--particularly if that word is an adjective or an adverb--it looks like you don't have a large enough vocabulary.

Here are four bits from this week's installment of The Onion's AV Club, the first from a review of The Untold Story Of Emmett Louis Till:

Examining one of the most wrenching periods in America's tortured racial history, the film looks into the infamous lynching of Emmett Till, a mischievous Chicago 14-year-old who, while on vacation in Mississippi, was brutally tortured and killed for the transgression of having allegedly wolf-whistled at a white woman.

Using "tortured" twice in one sentence, once as an adjective and once as a verb, might be a deliberate stylistic choice, but I wouldn't have done it, since it honestly sounds as if the writer couldn't come up with another adjective.

There's just no reason to use the adjective "fumbling" twice in two consecutive sentences in this review of The 40-Year-Old Virgin:

One's a raunchy, cartoonish Anchorman -like stoner comedy about a goofy-but-kind 40-year-old virgin (Carell) and his slacker buddies' fumbling attempts to get him laid. The other is a refreshingly adult but decidedly unfunny middle-aged romance about the fumbling courtship between a naïve hero with too little experience and a frustrated single mother/entrepreneur (Catherine Keener) struggling to raise a rebellious teenage daughter in a permissive society.

Following "sneaky", "sneak" seems like a bad echo in this review of Reel Paradise:

James' Hoop Dreams, Stevie, and Reel Paradise also share a sneaky sub-theme. In each, well-meaning people grapple with what they owe to the people they help. The theme plays strongest in Stevie, where James films his own attempts to renew a relationship with one of his old charity cases, but it sneaks into Reel Paradise as well, and eventually takes over a movie that initially seems to be more of a lark.

Obviously, it's possible to re-use words in close proximity: sometimes it's unavoidable, particularly when those words are nouns. But there are a number of rhetorical flourishes which deliberately repeat words (or even entire clauses) for effect, as in this parallel series of phrases from a review of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance:

Korean writer-director Park Chan-wook is a man of extremes: extreme camera angles, extreme lighting contrast, extreme long shots, extreme color schemes, extreme bursts of sound or lack of sound, and—particularly in the "Vengeance Trilogy" that comprises three of his four solo feature films to date—extreme violence.

Now that's how it's done. (In case you were wondering--you were wondering, weren't you?--this figure of speech is called "anaphora", the repetition of a word at the beginning of successive clauses. Much, much more of this sort of thing here, if you're interested.)