Words I Learned From Reading David Foster Wallace

pleonasm (n.) – the use of more words than are necessary to express an idea; redundancy

“In other words, it is when a scholar’s vanity/insecurity leads him to write primarily to communicate and reinforce his own status as an Intellectual that his English is deformed by pleonasm and pretentious diction (whose function is to signal the writer’s erudition) and by opaque abstraction (whose function is to keep anybody from pinning the writer down to a definite assertion that can maybe be refuted or shown to be silly.)”

Wallace, David Foster. “Authority and American Usage.” Consider the Lobster. New York: Back Bay Books, 2007. p 115.