I enjoyed reading an article from DailyWritingTips about redundant word combinations.

Besides sounding foolish, the practice of bolstering a word with a a word that replicates its meaning weakens the expressiveness of the language.

Although this is bad writing practice, I found most of the examples pretty humorous, so here they are for your enjoyment:

• return back
• progress forward
• forests of trees
• other alternatives
• continue on
• evacuated out
• regress back
• penetrate through
• speeding too fast
• refinanced again
• a human person
• charred black
• a baby nursery
• reiterate again
• fast forward ahead
• socialize together
• two twin towers
• a navy sailor
• an army soldier
• coupled together with
• adequate enough
• a free gift

And of course the all-time classic from Yogi Berra: “like ‘deja vu’ all over again.”

Design Patterns - Bridge PDF download

Decouple an abstraction from its implementation so that the two can vary independently.

This is one of my favorite Design Patterns and I've used it quite often when coding with GUI's. It allows you to completely seperate your GUI and your implementations of reactions to user input. For example, instead of calling a Windows MessageBox directly:

You create a "Bridge" class with a public "showMessageBox" function. You then have various classes for Windows, Mac, etc. which implement a message box for that specific OS. The Bridge class then serves as a bridge between your implementation and the specific implementations for the various OS's.