The Point of Legal Writing is Precision, Not Mass Appeal

Posted on May 14, 2013 by wellsdc

Au_marché_-_choux

The Lord’s Prayer is 66 words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words, and there are 1,322 words in the Declaration of Independence. Yet, government regulations on the sale of cabbage total 26,911 words.
David McIntosh, writing in National Review, October 24, 1995

I have seen variations on the above quote passed around via email and social media for years. The implication, I suppose, is that government regulations are needlessly verbose. According to Snopes.com, the sentiment long predates McIntosh’s article.

If you don’t think that the government has anything whatsoever to say if someone tries to sneak this into the stream of commerce, please stay away from my kitchen

I generally have the same response whenever I see this posted somewhere, although usually the person posting the quote has no interest in actually learning more about why our laws tend to be wordy. The Lord’s Prayer, Gettysburg Address, and Declaration of Independence all had very specific subjects and objectives; briefly stated, a recommendation on how to pray, motivation in wartime, and grounds for independence from England. History has generally deemed the number of words used in each of these writings sufficient to achieve these aims, but it is always possible to say the same thing with more or fewer words. In the event of a listeria outbreak in the nation’s cabbage supply, none of these writings will be of any assistance whatsoever (unless you believe that a few “Our Father”s will be enough to protect the public, in which case I sincerely hope you do not have a high-level position in a health department.) These documents, not to mention the number of words used in each of them, is completely, totally, utterly irrelevant to the nation’s cabbage supply. It is possible that regulations pertaining to cabbage are too wordy, but this comparison does not even come close to making that case. It’s just a less-clever-than-it-thinks attempt to rail against big guv’mint. If you don’t know much of anything about public safety regulations and/or have no desire to understand them, you might find the comparison compelling.

I bring this up because of a broader tendency among people who do not know much about law or legislation to lament the inscrutability of legal writing, arguing that it should be written in a way that nearly anyone could understand. Scott Greenfield, in a post with the ridiculously awesome title “The Fallacy of Simplicity,” annihilates this argument (go read his post. I’ll wait.) Continue reading →

Insomnia and Google Searches

Posted on February 20, 2013 by wellsdc

At least one night a week has been relatively sleepless, for unknown reasons so far. Since I am not one to allow a single waking hour to go unwasted, though, it seemed like high time to play around with the auto-fill function on Google. All of these are 100% and and happened between 2:30 and 3:00 a.m. today.

Indeed, these are the questions that haunt us in the wee hours of the night.

That’s, uh, good to know…

Okay, raise your hand if you saw that third one coming. Are you raising your hand? Liar. No one could have predicted that one.

o_O. Good night, Google. You obviously need sleep at least as much as me.

Today’s Bad Literary Pun

Posted on February 1, 2013 by wellsdc

A prominent feature of The Hunger Games books (no spoilers) is the annoyingly Twilight-esque question of whether Katniss will end up with Gale or Peeta, because even in the post-apocalyptic indeterminate future, apparently, young adult tropes demand a love triangle.

My point in bringing this up is that someone on Facebook just pointed out to me that the pairing of Peeta and Katniss may appropriately be dubbed PeeNiss.

Now it’s stuck in your head, too.

Stop! Grammar Time! The Case of the Missing Holiday Apostrophe

Posted on October 31, 2012 by wellsdc

If you’re at all like me (and for the sake of your mental health, I sincerely hope you are not), you often wonder things like “Why does ‘Halloween’ sometimes have an apostrophe between the two e’s?” or “Why didn’t I just wear some dang sunscreen on Sunday?” For the sake of brevity, I will limit myself to addressing the former question today.

Image courtesy of Susan Morrow

The word “Halloween,” as it turns out, has its origins in a Christian appropriation of a pagan festival. This is similar to, you know, nearly every major Christian holiday celebrated today. According to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s blog:

Despite the “pagan” origins and traditions of the holiday, it eventually was transformed into a Christian observance, closely linked to All Hallows Day or All Saints Day, November 1. All-Hallows-Even (that is, evening) is the night before All Hallows Day. The apostrophe in the earlier spelling of Hallowe’en denotes the missing “v” of “even.” You’ll find many “e’ens” in nineteenth-century and earlier poetry.

Leaving out the apostrophe, it would seem, is a shortcut around a shortcut. The laziness in omitting the apostrophe is not a new phenomenon, though, so don’t give me any grief about the younger generation not respecting their elders’ apostrophes. This goes back at least to the era of the Founding Fathers (who were presumably too busy revolutionizing to worry about excess punctuation.) Via Katherine Barber, a/k/a the Wordlady:

Halloween has been written without an apostrophe since at least 1773, according to the OED, and among the people using that spelling were Robbie Burns and Queen Victoria. There is no more reason to spell it with an apostrophe than there is to write “fan’cy” (contracted from “fantasy”), “gam’ut” (contracted from “gamma ut”), “lau’nder” (contracted from “lavender”), or “goodb’ye” (contracted from “God be with ye”). I think you can let it go!

Now you know. If you own a black cat, keep it safe.

Photo credit: Image by Susan Morrow, used with permission.

Stop! Grammar Time! “Decimate”

Posted on October 3, 2012 by wellsdc

A recent Doctor Who episode, “A Town Called Mercy,” featured a character who described a war that “decimated” more than half his planet. Something about that seemed mathematically problematic, so I thought I might investigate what “decimate” actually means. As it turns out, the Doctor Who character had it both right and wrong.

“Decimate” can mean “to reduce drastically especially in number” or “to cause great destruction or harm to.” That would be the Doctor Who meaning.

If you look at the word etymologically, though, you get the sense that the number 10 ought to be involved somehow. That’s where some older definitions come in: “to select by lot and kill every tenth man of” or “to exact a tax of 10 percent from.”

So using the original meaning, the character was super-mega-wrong. But no one cares anymore, so go nuts.

The Tale of My Fictitious Great-Grandfather

Posted on September 25, 2012 by wellsdc

320px-Gerbil_close-up_face My great-grandfather worked every day of his life, starting at the age of seven, and never owned a pair of shoes. By the time he was fifty, he had amassed a fortune of $1,000, which for the 1890′s would be worth about $100 billion today.

Then he was eaten by a pack of gerbils while trying to save a little boy who fell down a well.

There are no monuments to my great-grandfather, no songs that honor him, and no federal holiday that bears his name. But I know this, everything that happened to my great-grandfather was Barack Obama’s fault (except the good stuff. We can give Ronald Reagan credit for that.)

[Editor's note: This was a random stream-of-consciousness Facebook comment I left this morning inspired by this article.]

Photo credit: ”Gerbil close-up face” by Dan Foy from Nottingham, England [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Stop! Grammar Time! “A” versus “An”

Posted on September 19, 2012 by wellsdc

A discussion on Facebook not too long ago addressed how to use indefinite articles with abbreviations. Specifically, the question involved the abbreviation “FB” in place of “Facebook.” Should one write “a FB friend” or “an FB friend”?

It depends entirely on whether you would actually say the letters “FB” out loud or if you instantly translate that to “Facebook.” The use of “a” or “an” depends on whether the word that follows begins with a vowel sound or not. Even if you don’t move your lips when you read, you probably still hear the words as they are spoken in your head as you read (unless you are hearing impaired, in which case please accept my apologies.)

To provide an example:

“Don’t worry if the dominatrix breaks the skin. She’s an M.D., after all.”

versus

“Don’t worry if the dominatrix breaks the skin. She’s a medical doctor, after all.”

Things get a bit confusing where the letter “h” is concerned, but the same rule applies. I have long been confused by terms like “an historic event,” because they seem to violate the “vowel sound” rule.

The use of “an” before some “h” words, such as “historic” or “habitual,” is apparently more a British and Canadian thing, arising from accents that do not do much with the “h” sound. If you have an accent that would cause you to say “‘Enry ‘Iggins” instead of “Henry Higgins,” then you would certainly say “an ‘istoric event.” Otherwise, stick to “a historic event.” Do it for the sake of people like me, please.

Photo credit: ”EgyptianA-01″ by Unicode script proposal for Basic Egyptian Hieroglyphs, en.wiki: en:User:Nohat . Vectorization: Chabacano [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Stop! Grammar Time! Affect vs. Effect

Posted on September 12, 2012 by wellsdc

“Your attempts to effect a change in my demeanor will have no effect! You cannot affect my affect.”

There may be no greater quandary in the recent history of both the English written and spoken word, than that of affect or effect. The thing is, this is actually quite a humdinger, so I am going to have to split this into two levels, depending on the level of hoity-toitiness you want to display when speaking.

Basic Level:

If the level of speech employed by any of the Real Housewives is all to which you aspire, this is the section for you.

Affect is a verb meaning “to influence,” e.g. “When you threw champagne in my face at the country club, it did not affect me at all.”

Effect is a noun meaning “a result,” e.g. “When you threw champagne in Tiffani’s face at the country club, it had a profound effect on her.”

Advanced Level:

Please do not read beyond this point unless you speak English higher than a Downton Abbey level.

Affect can be a noun, describing mood or expression, e.g. “Her affect changed when she went from smiling to crying.” If you want to get really advanced, you could say “She didn’t even react when you threw champagne in her face, so clearly you did not affect her flat affect.”

Effect can be a verb, meaning “to bring about” or “to cause.” The most common usage seems to be in the context of “to effect a change.” “Throwing champagne in her face really effected a change in her behavior. She’s much nicer now.” More advanced: “Your champagne-throwing stunt effected a change in her affect.”

Now go forth and effect changes in the affects of those around you!

Sources: 1, 2

Photo credit: “Cross” by bjearwicke on stock.xchng.

Stop! Grammar Time! Begging the Question…

Posted on September 5, 2012 by wellsdc

What does it mean to “beg the question?” The phrase often appears where something like “raise the question” would be more appropriate, e.g. “Her jittery movements and obvious lack of focus begs the question of just how much cotton candy she has eaten today.” Really, it would be better to say this “raises” a question, because “begging the question” has a specific meaning among people who enjoy discussing logic (not that I hang out with people like that…)

To “beg the question” is to make an argument in which you have already assumed the truth of what you are trying to prove (see also circular reasoning). To use Wikipedia’s definition (which may bring up all new fallacies, but shut up), “begging the question” is:

a type of logical fallacy in which a proposition relies on an implicit premise within itself to establish the truth of that same proposition. In other words, it is a statement that refers to its own assertion to prove the assertion. Such arguments are essentially of the form “a is true because a is true” though rarely is such an argument stated as such. Often the premise ‘a’ is only one of many premises that go into proving that ‘a’ is true as a conclusion.

To give a few examples, via The Skeptic’s Dictionary: Continue reading →

Stop! Grammar Time! As-/En-/Insure

Posted on August 29, 2012 by wellsdc

4174609626_67c0bd0b9f This is my first post done by request. Clearly my power is growing…

The request specifically covered insure and ensure, but I am making an editorial decision to include assure as well, because it has been dragged into the eons-long feud between insure and ensure, and it deserves to have its pain acknowledged.

According to about.com, all three words mean “to make certain or secure,” but they approach the concept in different ways.

Assure is used in reference to people, and generally refers to the act of putting a person’s mind at ease about an issue. E.g. “I assured him that the barricades will keep the zombies out tonight.”

Ensure refers to actions taken to guarantee an outcome, e.g. “I welded extra plates of steel over the barricades to ensure that they will keep the zombies out tonight.”

Insure specifically refers to a financial and contractual arrangement to cover assets or expenses in the event of an injury, accident, or other loss, e.g. “I insured the house in the event the zombies get in and destroy it.”

Paul Brians (who is way better at this than I am) makes an interesting observation about “insurance” in America versus “insurance” in Europe:

European “life assurance” companies take the position that all policy-holders are mortal and someone will definitely collect, thus assuring heirs of some income. American companies tend to go with “insurance” for coverage of life as well as of fire, theft, etc.

Photo credit: ‘sua ensure nuoc’ by sammyshop2009, on Flickr.

Cryptic Philosopher

Tell My Father that I am Still Carrying On, Even Though I Am Wayward

Category Archives: Fun With Words