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 (In England and Wales, the term plaintiff has unfortunately been replaced by claimant).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.

I seem to have escaped the annual German white asparagus orgasm, at least for a while. I am here:

Note also purple sprouting broccoli, and Cyprus potatoes disguised with a bit of German.

This seems to be how they sell fruit after abandoning scales:

A nice witty judgment to read – see Words to good effect:

So judges can be just as flummoxed as we are by legalese. Here is one of the “astonishingly informative” definitions Sir Alan was referring to:

(1) An hereditament is anything which, by virtue of the definition of hereditament in s. 115(1) of the 1967 Act, would have been an hereditament for the purposes of that Act had this Act not been passed.

The judgment is here. It’s about a houseboat on which council tax was levied after its owner wrote to the council offering to make a payment in lieu – a move he surely regretted later. It’s about settlers and wayfarers.

The Northrop’s houseboat, a former Thames tug built in 1953 has many of the features that prospective house buyers look for. There are two good-sized bedrooms, two open fireplaces, gas central heating, a large sitting room and kitchen and several flat screen TVs. Old admiralty maps decorate the ceiling and there is even a grand piano and dedicated music room on board.

Further to the post on gender-neutral language, Johnson at the Economist links to a Washington State statute removing all traces of masculinity from its legislation.

But the Washington overhaul has pressed into service some awkward coinages. “Fishermen” will now be “fishers”, a word I can recall only ever having seen in the Bible (“Come and I will make you fishers of men”), and even then only to avoid the awkward “fishermen of men”. An “ombudsman” will now be an “ombuds”. “Ombudsmand”, a Scandinavian word, has the etymological meaning a “man who is asked for something”, ie, help or redress. Washington has shorn the title down to a meaningless “ask-for”.

Substitute Senate Bill 5077 (PDF) is 475 pages long and you can see crossed out all the amended terms.

It appears that the term ombuds instead of ombudsman is already in use outside Washington State, often in the term ombuds office at a university. I wonder whether it is singular or plural. Wiktionary says it is an abbreviation of ombudsman and is singular, and offers the anagram dumbo.

A commenter on the Johnson piece says that ombud is a perfectly good Scandinavian term. LATER NOTE: but I’m told that it is a good Scandinavian term with a different meaning!

LATER NOTE: It appears that the term ombud was introduced in Norway as a neutral form of ombudsman – see comments.