The phrase is indeed redundant, and intentionally so: it is a classic example of the linguistic phenomenon known as doubling, which is repeating the same idea using a different word, often a word with a slightly different nuance of meaning, for emphasis, to avoid misunderstanding or misinterpretation (it is used very often in legal documents for this reason), or simply for rhetorical flourish. In this case, where "all and sundry" is used as a synonym for everybody, the word all means everybody considered as a group or as a totality, whereas sundry means everybody considered as individuals, each separate and unique: it comes from the Old English word syndrig, which meant separate, and is related to the modern English word sunder. So "all and sundry" has the same meaning and is used for the same reasons as the other common doubles "one and all" and "each and every."

One of the hosts on CBC Radio Two (possibly Katie Mallek) wondered aloud why we say that somebody is "on the gravy train" to mean that they have a rather cushy job. She noted that there used to be a dog food called Gravy Train, and wondered how that brand name passed into the language and came to mean a job involving maximum benefits for minimum work. Good question!

I begin my answer by pointing out that Gravy Train dog food still exists: it is one of the brands owned by the parent company DelMonte Foods. It is sold dry but is intended to be mixed with water before being served, a process that immerses the solids in a gravy-flavoured liquid. To quote from the brand's Web site, <http://www.gravytraindog.com/:

If there's one thing dogs love, it's rich, beefy gravy. That's why every nugget of Gravy Train is basted in real beef juices. Just mix it with warm water, and you can give your dog a warm homestyle meal, dripping with the delicious gravy he loves.

The phrase is much older than the dog food, however. Like many brand names, this one is a small play on words: Gravy Train's distinuishing feature is that it produces a rich gravy when water is added, and the dog who is fed it presumably lives the life of Reilly. In other words, the expression gave rise to the name of the product rather than the other way round.

For the origin of the expression we have to go back all the way to the beginning of the last century (or, strictly speaking, to the end of the nineteenth): in 1900 we come across the first recorded us of the word gravy to mean easily acquired money, a sense that was played on in the 1951 Jerry Lewis song "The Navy Gets the Gravy (But the Army Gets the Beans)," the words to which can be found at <http://www.themadmusicarchive.com/song_details.aspx?SongID=7531>! The point of the song was that compared to the typical soldier, the typical sailor lives a life of luxury. He has climbed aboard the gravy train, in other words.

Train? What train? Why a train? That is because the expression in its present form originated as railway slang: the expression "gravy train" was invented by railwaymen in the 1920s to describe a run on which there was little work but for which the pay was good. The railways were very important in the life of early twentieth-century North America, and the expression quickly spread beyong the railway yards, in the process taking on the meaning it still has: any job that demands little but pays well or, often, just prosperity, however come by Its first appearance in print seems to have been in Benjamin Bodkin's 1945 novel, Lay My Burden Down: "They is on the gravy train and don't know it. . . ."

If you have a suggestion for a future posting, please leave me a MySpace message or get it to me any other way you can think of!