Promoting Redundancy

I may have gotten this a bit wrong, but I'm pretty sure I heard on NPR today a sponsorship from the job website monster.com, which said they make sure every employee has "passion, tenacity, and grit." I know for sure that last part is right.

Passion...okay. But tenacity and grit are synonyms. Wouldn't it be a better tag line with just one of those words?

Grit is a current buzzword in education (I get 11,600,000 hits in Google for those two words together, in fact). I'm sure I've quoted a few people in the past on one my Twitter roundups or Too Many Tabs posts who point out that lacking grit is just another way to say deficit theory, but here's one example from Paul Thomas.

Even worse than the monster.com phrase, I just found out (while finding those 11 million hits) that there's a book called Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance published by the U.S. Department of Education. Yes, there are three synonyms in that title.

These writers and thinkers need to apply a little of their tenacity/grit/perseverance to how they use words to communicate. Because right now they sound like the Department of Redundancy Department.