Notes & Asides

Dear Mr. Buckley:

In your review of The Tenth Man in The New York Times Book Review, you wrote: “And early on in the book . . .” I’ve come to expect from you a certain care with the language. I don’t understand this usage. I’ve noticed its regular occurrence lately and assumed it was incorrectly modeled on “later on,” and was just another of the linguistic fads which come and go like pop songs. I thought Howard Cosell was responsible for it. Like him, it seems redundant.