The Penguin Dictionary of American English Usage and Style : A ...

P
PACHYDERM. See Synonymic silliness,
1.
PADDY. Paddy is rice. It comes from
the Malay padi, meaning rice in the
husk, and in the strictest sense paddy denotes
such rice, whether it is growing or
has been harvested. By extension, the
word can also mean rice in general. Used
loosely, it means rice field.
Describing an Egyptian oasis, a book
explains that the growing of rice there is
forbidden for fear of malaria, because
“mosquitoes thrive in paddy fields.”
Paddy is used admirably. On the contrary,
these press samples show no understanding
of it:
Across the rice paddies, several
hundred men from leftist organizations
carried red banners. . . .
The dilapidated brick villages and
bright green rice paddies in this corner
of southern China sometimes
seem as American as chop suey.
Many Cambodian houses are built
on stilts near the rice paddies that line
the road.
“Rice paddies” is redundant. Change all
the “paddies” to fields, or at least omit
“rice.”
Rice is totally absent in a piece about
Maui, Hawaii, by a travel editor:
“White-haired old men and women return
from their taro paddies, their legs
spackled with mud.” The people work
in taro fields. Taro is an edible plant that
has nothing to do with paddy. (Moreover
speckled is misspelled and “old” is
superfluous editorializing.)
PAIR. Pair (noun), like couple, concerns
two of the same kind. Pair, however,
often stresses their close
association, perhaps their mutual dependence:
a pair of pants, a pair of scissors.
Pair, like other collective nouns, may be
either singular or plural. It depends on
which gets the emphasis: the group as a
unit or its individual members.
If you say, “A blue pair of pants does
not go with a brown pair of shoes,” you
are emphasizing the oneness of each
pair. But “A pair of soldiers were guarding
the entrance to their post.” To say
“was guarding . . . its” post would be
ridiculous. When pair refers to people, it
is normally plural.
A nature film depicted two dangerous
animals of Africa, the cape buffalo and
the hippopotamus. The narrator said,
“When the pair clashes, the outcome is
uncertain.” The two clash. They could
not do so if they were one. Besides, pair
has special meaning when applied to animals:
it denotes two that are either
mated or yoked for labor.
pair 283