A question for the pedants out there: is it ever correct to say “a tad bit”? ((maybe I should do a poll…))
I have always thought that “tad” means “a little bit” so that the correct usage is “a tad late” or “a tad too much”, but I see lots and lots of people saying “a tad bit late” or “a tad bit too much”.
Although I think it is wrong, I couldn’t find anything in Gowers’ Complete Plain Words, Fowler’s Modern English Usage, Partridge’s Usage & Abusage or even any of the obvious online resources that even mentions “tad” let alone gives any sort of guidance. How frustrating to have all these reference books and then when I finally want to look something up it isn’t there!
Google finds 967,000 results for the phrase “a tad bit” so its quite a common mistake, if it even is a mistake (as opposed to just an American usage, say). But Google also finds 11,400,000 results for “a tad” (which would include the previous 967,000 hits) so generally it looks like the prevailing usage is split 10:1-ish in favour of what I always assumed, but I just didn’t feel like trawling those millions of pages to see if any had an expert opinion.
The only person I ever knew personally who says “a tad bit” is Australian, so that’s not really a good guide.
I would say that it is repetitious, so rather like saying “a little short walk” – and it certainly sounds wrong.
However, we do say “a tiny little thing” but in that case it is, I think, to add emphasis, which is not the case in the examples you quote.
In my view “a tad bit” is poor English and should be avoided.
I think Gowers and Fowler would take that view, and I think their books should be compulsory reading – especially Gowers.
Wasn’t Gowers originally intended to be compulsory reading for civil servants?
There is also the interesting example from the North East where both ‘canny’ and ‘bonny’ suggest attractive qualities (she’s a canny lass or she’s a bonny girl) but calling someone ‘canny bonny’ is giving a sense of ‘fairly pretty’ or ‘pretty enough but not as pretty as the girl I described as bonny….’ That seems to make it a repetition for the very opposite of emphasis.
I am amused by attempts to take our varied, organic and ramshackle language and apply rules from formal Latin, Ancient Greek or maths to it.
It may have been decided that double negatives make a positive but large areas of the country use negatives to reinforce: everyone knows what “I never done nuffink” means and its far more emphatic than “I didn’t do anything”
It reminds me of the school teacher who tells her class the ‘rules’ of language and insists that two negatives make a positive but two positives can’t make a negative. One of the kids replies… “Yeah, right!”
We can blame Latin (or Latin teachers) for the idea that we shouldn’t split infinitives. In fact, in Latin, it isn’t (I believe) possible to split one – in English it is. Logically, therefore, we can split an infinitive if we want to. Even if just to show that English is a more versatile language than Latin!
And thats how you end up with awkward phrases like the Observer used today in a story about fixing up the Commonwealth Institute – “They want a firm sensitively to restore the site…”