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Why...
Why do people say "work colleague"? What other kinds of colleague are there? I never hear people refer to a [something else] colleague, but they do talk about "someone I'm running an event with" or "someone else on the committee" or similar. Why, then, do so many people tend to qualify the word "colleague" in what amounts to nothing but tautology?
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tautology
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And yes, someone on my quiz team might get the term "colleague" applied to them, but people doing that are unlikely to qualify it as "quiz team colleague" - they're more likely to use the phrase in a tongue in cheek manner, eg "my colleague here feels the answer is wasp, but we as a team have gone for badger". When "person at work" is the default understanding of the term colleague, why is it so common for people to try to add precision?
To draw a parallel, people often talk about "the office", in phrases like "When I got to the office...", "The office is really empty today...", or "I didn't leave the office until 9pm". I don't hear people say "work office" or "workplace office" or "[company name] office" (unless they're talking about an off-site one, maybe a customer's place where they were at a meeting).
It just seems weird to me.
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In English we seem to pick up on phrases and use them without really thinking about the components of the phrase. So probably people have gotten to thinking of "work colleague" as just one phrase, and not two separate ways of saying the same thing.
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- 4am in the morning
- returned back
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