Supernatural Law / Comic

Supernatural Law – among other things, a web comic.

The decomposing corpse of Mary Lou Henderson has returned from the dead to seek revenge on her husband, who was just acquitted of her murder. Talk about no justice! … Mary Lou has retained legal counsel to take revenge in court.

Via Wikipedia:

In May 1994 an ongoing comic book series was launched “Wolff and Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre”, under the imprint Exhibit A Press. The title was changed to Supernatural Law with issue #24, in part to avoid readers’ confusion over how to pronounce “macabre,” and to bring it in line with the planned title of a motion picture adaptation.

14 thoughts on “Supernatural Law / Comic

  1. I thinks the difference is purely regional Margaret. In Bristol, when I was growing up, it was ALWAYS Registry Office. Anyone who called it the “Register Office” would have been considered to have arrived from the Planet Zog. Those who have a problem with it should shut up and get a life (i.e. worry about more important things like not forgetting to watch Coronation Street, breathing and having a good time occasionally…)

    Paul

  2. North of The Border, the things are officially called “registration offices”, but I seem to remember that the actual sign in Kirkcaldy said “Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages” – though “Civil Partnerships” may now have been added to that. The central register (which is where all the records are kept) is called the General Register Office for Scotland (http://www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/index.html).

  3. ‘Registration office’ was new to me. There are General Register Offices for England and Wales, for Scotland, and for Northern Ireland (as I know for the first two from ordering copies of certificates for family history!)
    Registrar of births, deaths and marriages is the normal term for the equivalent of the Standesbeamter – there are many types of registrars, and sometimes you need to disambiguate.

  4. >>But people call it ‘registry office’ all the time – what did it actually say on the building?

  5. Like Paul, I have posted a longer response on the site where it all came up.

    Potted version: I plead for “registry office” as a possible variant.
    If you Google for “registry office” with the domain “gov.uk” you will find plenty of ammunition to fuel the debate. Many sites seem to use “register office” and “registry office” interchangeably.

    OK, I plead guilty to stark raving descriptivism.

  6. May I repeat that I agree with both of you that ‘registry office’ is OK. In fact the question of descriptivism and prescriptivism is one of the big problems with translation, isn’t it, and with teaching translation.
    Victor, about the sites using register office and registry office as alternatives, that is certainly true. But when I checked it yesterday, I got the impression that some sites have both as key words for search purposes, so you would find the site even if you used the ‘wrong’ term. I am not sure if I can be bothered to do a longer study, though.

  7. I considered the keyword possibility, so I specified “body of the text” in Google extended search.
    In fact, I even found mixed use within the same website, sitting there on several .gov.uk sites.
    In fact, I found 23,000 sites using the versions alongside each other, and 178,000 for “registry office” alone.

  8. As intimated, traffic signs in Eng. & Wales point to the Register Office or to the (Land/Probate)Registry Office – 2 totally different institutions that have been mixed up in common parlance. Hence, the court throwing out the application.

    Also, it is not only Scotland, but the pan-UK website that is called the General Register Office. NB Folk Lore’s blog would not let me post this without an obscure registration process.

  9. With that system, I usually choose ‘Anonymous’ and give my name and website. No need to register.

    Apparently the court threw out the application because the exact wording of a couple of lines hadn’t been given correctly – ‘Registry office’ was online part of that. So we don’t know if they would have thrown it out for the mere use of the term.

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