Peter Urban ist ein schlechter Verlierer und hat heute Abend echt Sympathiepunkte eingebüßt. #esc2013 (tweeted by Hansjörg Schmidt)

The ESC is usually a time of soul-searching for Germany. This time, their song Glorious by Cascada (the singer Natalie Horler grewup in Germany but her parents are British) was early reputed to be a copy of last year’s winner Euphoria by Loreen.

You can compare them on this Independent page, at least if you aren’t in Germany, where Loreen’s video is replaced by the familiar Denglish message:

Unfortunately this video is not available in Germany because it may contain music for which GEMA has not granted the respective music rights.

We know that countries often vote for their neighbours, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard the word Nachbarn as often as I did from the German commentator on TV last night. Charlie Bavington rightly tweeted me asking if Germany has no neighbours.

Most bizarre of all was the theory that began to develop at the end that the reason Cascada got so few votes was possibly because of Merkel’s economic policies. As though Cascada needed any help!

See WAZ: Billige Ausrede für ESC-Debakel von Cascada? ARD-Mann gibt Merkel Schuld

Reuters picked it up later:

“There’s obviously a political situation to keep in mind – I don’t want to say ‘this was 18 points for Angela Merkel’,” said Germany’s ARD TV network coordinator Thomas Schreiber. “But we all have to be aware that it wasn’t just Cascada up there on stage (being judged) but all of Germany.”
…
“It’s unexplainable,” said ARD expert commentator Peter Urban on Sunday after Cascada singer Natalie Horler was 21st even though German media had touted her as a favorite. More than 8 million Germans watched, a 44 percent market share.

“Is it that people just don’t like us?” Urban was asked on ZDF TV. “There’s some truth to that,” he said.
“There will be two German soccer teams in the Champions League final next week and maybe people didn’t want Germany to win Eurovision too.”

Congratulations to German American Law Journal blog on ten years as a blog (and even longer as a pre-blog).

10 Jahre US-Recht auf Deutsch

This diagram shows which of the Supreme Court justices (AS = Antonin Scalia) got the most laughs in court in the 2004-2005 term. The information was published by Professor Jay D. Wexler in Green Bag as Laugh Track (PDF file). That term was the first time that the Court Reporter started revealing when the public had laughed.

The data revealed the following results :

“Justice Scalia won the competition by a landslide, instigating 77 laughing episodes, while Justice Thomas instigated zero laughing episodes, putting him all alone in last place among the Justices.”

Why am I not surprised?

Later, Jason Wojciechowski researched further in [Laughter.] on the Supreme Court: Expanding on Professor Wexler’s ‘Laugh Track’
(SSRN downloadable paper).

In view of the fact that Scalia speaks most, he wanted to check whether the figures were misleading. Scalia still came out top, but Thomas was not investigated because ‘He speaks so seldom as to make it pointless to examine his performance.’

Via Martin Gardiner in Improbable Research, with special thanks to Trevor in Barcelona.

This is a video explaining the work of the Supreme Court (embedded in a useful Guardian article). I quite like the graphics but am not sure about the woman introducing it, Stacey Dealey (?). That is a kind of estuary English (Lord Kerr speaks otherwise). She seems to swallow the T at the end of words but not in the middle position. It isn’t quite as fake as Jamie Oliver, though. And one of the judicial assistants has a Scottish accent.
One misses the red leather of the seats in the House of Lords, although I suppose the law lords sat in a committee room rather than in the house.

There’s an open day on Saturday May 25, which I gather is also Towel Day and German football day.

Suspect pleads not guilty in fatal beating trial write The Local, opening an interesting possibility in German criminal trials, where we wondered whether you were ever asked how you plead:

The suspected ringleader of a vicious beating that left 20-year-old Jonny K dead at Berlin’s central Alexanderplatz train station, pled not guilty on Monday as his trial began.

Google books shows a book called International Criminal Procedure: The Interface of Civil Law and Common Law, edited by Linda Carter and Fausto Pocar, which says:

Civil law systems also continue to favor confessions over guilty pleas. In contrast to guilty pleas, confessions are typically more detailed and do not entirely eliminate the trial process. Instead, courts receiving a confession are expected to continue the proceedings and review the evidence supporting the credibility of the confession. This is consistent with the traditional commitment of continental systems to uncovering the precise truth of the case.

Deutsche Welle does as well in Jonny K. murder trial begins in Berlin

The victim’s sister Tina K. will appear as a co-plaintiff.

(Actually, The Local uses co-plaintiff too). At least co-plaintiff is in the legal dictionaries, but I always wonder about plaintiff in a criminal trial. I used to call it private co-prosecutor, an invention of my own, when I was teaching. I have also recorded accessory prosecution for Nebenklage.

I found a Northern Ireland case where the term co-plaintiffs was used, but it referred to joint plaintiffs in a civil case. (In England and Wales, the term plaintiff has unfortunately been replaced by claimant).

Jeremy Gardner’s A brief list of misused English terminology in EU publications (PDF file) of January 2012 was recently widely blogged and tweeted – someone must have stumbled across it.

KATER NOTE: updated link 2017:
Misused English words and expressions in EU publications

He begins:

Over the years, the European institutions have developed a vocabulary that differs from that of any recognised form of English. It includes words that do not exist or are relatively unknown to native English speakers outside the EU institutions (‘planification’, ‘to precise’ or ‘telematics’ for example) and words that are used with a meaning, often derived from other languages, that is not usually found in English dictionaries (‘coherent’ being a case in point).

Some of the words on the list (which is quite long) are words taken from other languages and transmuted into ‘English’. A good example is a list of spoken-language words which are actually not discussed further but mentioned in passing:

Finally, there is a group of words, many relating to modern technology, where users (often even native speakers) ‘prefer’ a local term (often an English word or acronym) to the one normally used in English-speaking countries, which they may not actually know, even passively (‘GPS’ or ‘navigator’ for ‘satnav’, ‘SMS’ for ‘text’, ‘to send an SMS to’ for ‘to text’, ‘GSM’ or even ‘Handy’ for ‘mobile’ or ‘cell phone’, internet ‘key’, ‘pen’ or ‘stick’ for ‘dongle’, ‘recharge’ for ‘top-up/top up’ etc. The words in this last list have not been included because they belong mostly to the spoken language.

I always have to remind myself to say ‘satnav’ for ‘GPS’ when I’m in England. And one of the aims of the list is to inform new staff about the meaning of terminology used in EU legislation (foreseen instead of provided, for instance).

Anglo-Saxon is a bugbear for me too, since I was described in the prospectus of our college in Erlangen as teaching ‘Anglo-Saxon law’.
Shall: here is a very useful point on legal English which I’ve had to point out myself in the past: shall is used in legislation or contracts, but not when informally summarizing them, that is, it is not used in this legal meaning in everyday English:

Shall
Explanation: In the third person (he/she/it/they), ‘shall’ should only be used if you are writing legislation or contracts or are quoting directly from them (in inverted commas). It should never be used when paraphrasing legislation or quoting it indirectly.
Examples: ‘The seven members of the board are selected from among experts possessing outstanding competence in the field of statistics. They perform their duties in their personal capacity and shall act independently100.’ ‘Competent authority : The central authority of a Member State competent for the organisation of official controls (sic) in the field of organic production, or any other authority to which that competence has been conferred. It shall also include, where appropriate, the corresponding authority of a third country (sic)101.’
Alternatives: must, should, is/are, is to/are to, can, may (as appropriate).

So-called is another word I avoid. Some Germans say they avoid sogenannt too, but judging from the texts I translate that is not universal.

Mark Liberman at Language Log has now taken up this list and pointed out that some of the words are not as much EU inventions as the list would claim.

In case of pigs and poultry…

He finds the memo ‘fussy in spots’ but largely OK.

Along the same lines, there was recently an article in the Guardian entitled Grammar rules everyone should follow. I read it through and agreed only with some of it. I found the attempt to enforce a distinction between that and which particularly irritating.

2. That/which

“Which is appropriate to non-defining and that to defining clauses,” HW Fowler wrote in his Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926). “The dog that ran in front of my bike had floppy ears.” “The dog, which had floppy ears, ran in front of my bike.” It’s often a fine distinction, and was very possibly invented by Fowler, but it can nonetheless be useful. As with dangling participles, it’s about saying what you mean.

This time, Peter Harvey has done the dissection work in English and the Guardian.