The Department of Redundancy Department (Time Machine Section)

Another post not about triathlon. What am I thinking?

I was reading Maclean’s (which used to call itself “Canada’s National Newsmagazine”) when I came across this sentence about Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States Attorney for Northern Illinois:

Nor has success diverted him from a vocation that he seems to treat as a calling.

This is careless (perhaps ignorant) wordsmithy: vocation is just a nice Latin word for calling.

(The article is not on line yet, though I expect it will be at some point, at Maclean’s site.)

A further irrelevancy, but Maclean’s is a weekly, and the issue in which I read the above is dated Mar. 12. I got it in my mailbox Feb. 28! That seems weird to me.