Bad Language

I don't have an English degree or anything, but it bothers me when I hear redundancies that I find annoying. Here are some prime examples:

• ATM machine
• PIN number
• SAT test
• ISBN number (Although I will admit that I work for a book publisher yet didn't know that ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number until I looked it up just now. But I did know that the N stands for Number. And here's another tidbit, whether or not you're interested. ISBNs used to be ten digits, but unused ten digit numbers are as scarce as silver dollars these days, so ISBNs are now thirteen digits.)

Here's one that is often heard in voice mail messages: I am currently away from my desk at the present time. Well, it's hard to be currently away from your desk yesterday. Finally, when I visit my family doctor and they want to mail me lab results, the girl hands me an envelope and asks me to self-address it to myself. Since, to my knowledge, I have not yet been cloned, it would be a breach of all the medical privacy laws to self-address it to someone else. My clone or I would have to go directly to jail without passing GO for that.