Learn English – the difference between the adjectives “live” and “alive”

To understand what this simple phrase means first think of the literal meaning, that the person was abandoned because it was assumed that they were already dead, mortally wounded or that it was inevitable that they die.

But there is more to the phrase than that. In common usage, this phrase is often part of a narrative where a person was expected to die, yet against the odds they survived. Some examples from COCA:

Left for dead by a busy road, Susan managed to get a ride to a police station where she insisted she be brought to the Nairobi Women's Hospital.

Pueschel, just 11-years-old, was beaten, stabbed and left for dead, but he lived to testify against Reginald and Gerry Mahaffe.

... a young man in Los Angeles was robbed, shot, left for dead, but he lived because a bullet was stopped by a radio in his pocket.

The common theme in these stories is an act of cruelty towards an innocent person who survives either by a stroke of luck or a miracle. A proper reading of the title Left for Dead should include cruelty, abandonment but also a sense of hope.

"Redundant" involves repetition. In the following example, there are two examples of redundancy: "This blue, azure shirt is torn and ripped." Blue and azure are redundant, and torn and ripped are redundant. Note that these redundancy pairs do not include words that are exactly synonymous, but which are close enough in meaning that one would usually consider them redundant. Two points here: 1. Neither word in such a pair is necessarily the redundant one; either one can be considered redundant, depending on which one you consider to be the more important, useful, or accurate one in the given context. Commonly, the second word is considered the redundant one, but that is merely because the first word got a chance to establish itself before the second one came along; if you were revising the text, you might choose to keep the second, not the first. 2. The same word repeated ("this blue blue shirt") is an example of redundancy, but this is usually done for emphasis, or for poetic effect, and so is seldom saddled with the accusation of redundancy. Thus, "redundant" does tend to carry the implication of an unnecessary repetition.

A tip: To help you remember this, note that "redundant" begins with "re," as in "repetition." That piece of these words means "again."

"Superfluous," on the other hand, refers to something that is more than what is necessary. Think of water running over the rim of a glass when you continue to pour water into it beyond its capacity. The water over- (super) flows (fluous). Often something superfluous is so because it is needlessly repetitive, and this confuses the picture a bit. But in my opinion, "superfluous" is better used when the element is not repetitive, but is genuinely not needed, as in this example: "After George embedded the fence post in thirty pounds of concrete buried underground, the brick he balanced atop the post to hold it down was superfluous."