Sometimes we hear people say :“It’s red in colour.”
I am just wondering whether there is a need to add the phrase “in colour”, since we already know that red IS a colour.
Is it incorrect or simply a common usage problem?
cheers!
.
No need to add ‘in colour’. I wouldn’t call it a problem, exactly, but many ESL/EFL students feel the need to add the phrase.
To add to what Mr. Micawber said, I’ll mention that some columnists and other authors who make a living writing ornery complaints about the state of the English language will often use almost exactly that sentence, “It’s red in color,” as a classic example of bad writing.
The problem is not the grammar. There’s nothing wrong with the sentence grammatically. It’s that, as you mention, “red in color” is spectacularly redundant in English, and redundancy is supposed to be a big sin in English writing.
Very often you find ESL students writing something like, “It’s red in color,” or, “It has a red color,” when color names exist in their native languages only as adjectives. In English, color names can be both adjectives and nouns. Speakers of some languages can’t get used to this, so, as Mister Micawber wrote, they often feel the need to add the noun “color” somewhere.