During one of my interviews for university I was asked to define tautology, unfortunately at the time I had no fucking idea. “Taut… tight… when a sentence is very short?” Looking at me like I was a bit of an idiot, the interviewer kindly offered a prompt: “Something about repetition?” This magically kickstarted a memory of actually knowing what tautology was, and I blurted out, “Oh yes, expressing the same thing in multiple ways, like in Henry V when Fluellen says ‘He is a magnanimous man, a generous man, a kind-hearted man’” (I’ve just looked and no such quote exists, god knows where I pulled that from).
Anyway, I got the place, and now I’m a big shot writer guy.