symmetria

Meet my pet Peeve:

He likes to think he's pretty great.

Actually, I don't really have a "pet peeve".  You can ask me what my pet peeve is, and I won't give you an answer.  Not a whole lot of stuff bugs me beyond belief.  I guess I'm fairly tolerant of those stupid little things that people hate.

Probably because I do all of them.

But the reason why I drew a picture of a green monster-looking thing is because today in calculus class, we were discussing a surface that had symmetry.  And suddenly, every other word said in our discussion was this:

"symmetrical"

According to the online dictionaries, "symmetrical" is a valid word.  But I don't think that it should be.  Think about it.  "Symmetrical" is a word used to describe an object that has symmetry.  So we needed to turn the word "symmetry" into an adjective.

Which is why the word "symmetric" exists.  It's an adjective, derived from "symmetry".

So isn't "symmetrical" just redundant?  You took a word, and double-adjectived it? (Yes, i just nouned "adjective"...and then I nouned "noun"...but at least I didn't double-noun anything...)

I guess my major tiff with the word "symmetrical" is that "symmetric" sounds better (to me) and it's shorter and means the same thing...and it's only a first-degree adjective...

But apparently "symmetrical" is in the dictionary, so I can't really call people out and say, "'symmetrical' is not a word", which is too bad. Because it sounds dumb.

Is it valid to say, then, that my "pet peeve" is the word "symmetrical"?  It may have just become one, after all...

Perhaps I'm what some might call a language "elitist".  And I would have to correct them, and say language "aficionado" is more correct.