Great minds, etc. You know I was just thinking about this the other day, but I was thinking the term might be acronymic redundancy or some such. Still, tautology makes sense to me as well. Anyway, here's a small list I found.

http://www.emich.edu/~linguist/issues/4/4-501.html

I'm not sure irritation describes my feeling on the subject. Or maybe it does. These things just sound weird - like some gibbering kid is talking to me. Oddly, when my kids were young I didn't use baby language with them, but now that they're older I'm all the time petting them and calling them baby and such. It would make me wanna puke if I thought about it too much. My youngest is 10, but a really teeny ten. Wife buys milk by the gallon and she can't fill her own bowl, so she asks me to do it for her. "You want your daddy to pour you some milky milk, Baby Girl?" <glare> "Yes, please." Or, the chinese word for egg is dan, but we call it dan dan. "You want Daddy to make you a dan dan?"

Anyway, when I hear some of these, it requires a measure of discipline to avoid sliding into that role. Trouble at the supermarket. "Sir you need to type in your PIN number again." "Does Daddy need to type in his PIN number again, Baby Girl?" "Security to checkout!"

k