There is an evident pleasure in the doubling of terms. Shakespeare, tore more fascinated by wealth of sound than added meaning, was always at this trick. It suits the sense of rhythm to add slings to arrows. just as the heat of the day sounds all the hotter for becoming "heat and burden." (A common misquotation for "burden and heat") In ordinary times. when words need not be counted so thriftily, I see no vice in this habit of the repetition if it really adds to the weight and trims the balance of the sentence. Quality of sound can be as precious to speech as meaning itself. But there are many doublings which are pure cliche.
There is. for example. a curious and common attachment of the mind to phrases of this order whose components may mean almost nothing to the user, if employed in separation. How many of the thousands who talk of the Biblical "jot and tittle" know what "a tittle" is, or would ask for a tittle of cheese at the grocer's? "Tittle" happens to be "a small stroke or point in writing or printing." So it came to mean something tiny. But it is now almost dead except in the reviving company of "jot." And how many of the jot-and-tittlers know that "jot" is also a printing word. being a corruption of the Greek "iota," the smallest of the alphabet's letters? But "jot and tittle" remains in frequent usage, a perfect example of the double-barrelled cliche. Not even the direst paper-shortage will set these twain asunder. Like flotsam and jetsam, they drift united on the lo of speech.
"Few and far between" is another example of a double-barrelled phrase always rather pompous and now, for the journalist, a mockery as well. Not only must his words be fewer. but packed far closer too.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.