I’ve mentioned Stenography before. Today Jack Schofield shows there is also Palantyping, in answer to this question:
I attended a gathering in Richmond Theatre, at which the then mayor and members of the Greater London Authority were available for public questioning. It was very impressive that their words almost immediately appeared on a screen courtesy of a voice recognition system. How is it done?
Judge Alex Kozinski and Eugene Volokh on the use of Yiddish in court decisions:
Searching through the LEXIS legal opinions database reveals that “chutzpah” (sometimes also spelled “chutzpa,” “hutzpah,” or “hutzpa”) has appeared in 231 reported court decisions. Curiously, all but eleven of them have been filed since 1980. There are two possible explanations for this. One is that during the last 21 years there has been a dramatic increase in the actual amount of chutzpah in the United States–or at least in the U.S. legal system. This explanation seems possible, but unlikely.
The more likely explanation is that Yiddish is quickly supplanting Latin as the spice in American legal argot. As recently as 1970, a federal court not only felt the need to define “bagels”; it misdefined them, calling them “hard rolls shaped like doughnuts.” All right-thinking people know good bagels are rather soft. (Day-old bagels are rather hard, but right-thinking people do not eat day-olds, even when they are only 10 cents each.) We’ve come a long way since then.
Mind you, there’s no comparison with US language outside lawsuits.
This is a 1993 article, Lawsuit, Shmawsuit, available online.
(Via Ruth Morris, who writes on Interpreting in legal contexts and Interpreting in the Israel legal system – and has published on the same topic in England and Wales)
There must be a lot of errors made with search-and-replace on newspapers. But somehow I seem only to read about the PC ones.
For instance, Tyson Gay is not called Tyson Homosexual.
I also recall reading of Nelson Mandela referred to as an Afro-American.
Rechtsanwalt Jens Hänsch, Dresden, compared part of an Austrian judgment he received with its German equivalent. I shamelessly reproduce both:
Was in Deutschland hieße
1. Der Beklagte wird verurteilt, an die Klägerin 1.144,50 Euro zuzüglich Zinsen in Höhe von 9,47 % seit dem 10.04.2006 zu zahlen.
2. Der Beklagte hat die Kosten des Rechtsstreits zu tragen.
3. Das Urteil ist vorläufig vollstreckbar.heißt Im Namen der Republik wie folgt:
Die beklagte Partei ist schuldig, der klagenden Partei den Betrag von € 1.144,50 samt Zinsen in Höhe von 9,47 % seit 10.04.2006 sowie die Prozesskosten gemäß § 19a RAO zu Handen der Klagsvertreter zu bezahlen, all dies binnen 14 Tagen bei sonstiger Exekution.
At least they didn’t write ‘samt Anhang’!
On this topic, I do wish people asking questions on translators’ mailing lists would say if their text is German, Swiss or Austrian and if their audience is specifically British, American or global.
Some Germans – lawyers or translators – can write really good legal English but tend to be more Catholic than the Pope (päpstlicher als der Papst) when doing so.
I’m reminded of this by the (new) legal writer’s quote in his latest entry:
“Much bad writing today comes not from the conventional sources of verbal dereliction—sloth, original sin, or native absence of mind—but from stylistic imitation. It is learned, an act of stylistic piety which imitates a single style, the bureaucratic style I have called The Official Style. This bureaucratic style dominates written discourse in our time, and beginning or harried or fearful writers adopt it as protective coloration.”
—Richard A. Lanham, Revising Prose vi (3d ed. 1992).
(This is quoted from Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day, which I don’t receive).
That refers to native English speakers writing English, who have less excuse, of course.
Particular features of this hyperlegalese:
use of said and aforesaid where it adds nothing
use of such instead of this/these
Here’s a site that objects to it too (Alabama Legislative Reference Service):
Rule 10. Use of “Such”
Do not use “such” as a substitute for “the,” “that,” “it,” “those,” “them,” or other similar words.
Example: “The (not ‘such’) application shall be in the form the court prescribes.” Use “such” to express “for example” or “of that kind.”
overuse of shall. I quote an example from Butt and Castle on Modern Legal Drafting:
If the Vendor shall within one month of the receipt of such notice give written notice (If the Vendor … gives would suffice)
Here is Todd Bruno of Louisiana State University, quoting Gerald Lebovits:
About said, as in aforesaid, Justice Smith asked whether one would say, “I can do with another piece of that pie, dear. Said pie is the best you’ve ever made.” About same, he asked whether one would say, “I’ve mislaid my car keys. Have you seen same?” About the illiterate such, he asked whether one would say, “Sharon Kay stubbed her toe this afternoon, but such toe is all right now.” About hereinafter called, he asked whether one would say, “You’ll get a kick out of what happened today to my secretary, hereinafter called Cuddles.” About inter alia, he asked, “Why not say, ‘Among other things?’ But, more important, in most instances inter alia is wholly unnecessary in that it supplies information needed only by fools …. So you not only insult your reader’s intelligence but go out of your way to do it in Latin yet!”
See also the Legalese Hall of Shame.
The Guardian recently had an article entitled Digital thieves swipe your photos – and profit from them.
Pedantic readers were having none of this theft terminology. Hence yesterday’s technology blog post: What’s the right way to talk about copyright stuff?
The aggrieved reader wrote (in part):
“I only read the heading and subheadings of this. For god’s sake, at least use the correct terminology. The photographs in question simply are not being stolen. They’re being copied. No thieves in existence there, but copiers. Illegal copiers I’m sure (whether it’s a good idea for so many things to be illegal to copy or not is another issue). You’re not helping us nor yourselves by perpetuating this kind of BS. The party who initially has possession of the item in one case no longer has the item, and in the other, does. That’s a big difference. That’s why we have different words with very different meanings to describe the two fundamentally different situations. But you’ve got them mixed up. And helped other people get them mixed up too.”
There is an attempt to fight a rearguard action from the legal point of view, but after all, a bit of polemic must surely be permitted, and the latter would be the better argument.
Comment by the author, Charles Arthur:
@ParkyDR @nickholmes: “A person is guilty of theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it; and “thief” and “steal” shall be construed accordingly.”
Surely the property here is intellectual property, which courts have construed as existing in the same way that physical property does.
The “permanent deprivation” is of the opportunity to sell it (or prevent it being sold).
The Theft Act says that property ‘includes money and all other property, real or personal, including things in action and other intangible property’ – but the things in action have to be capable of appropriation.
(Dietl: chose in action (einklagbares) Forderungsrecht; obligatorischer Anspruch (der Gegenstand einer Klage sein kann); unkörperlicher Rechtsgegenstand (Wechsel, Sparguthaben, Patente, Urheberrecht, Versicherungspolice, Rente etc))
Comment by AlexC:
As a former copyright lawyer, I think “theft” is *technically* the wrong word. But then most people don’t understand the technical meaning of “theft”, so what does it really matter?
As a matter of general practice, the term “copyright theft” has been around for quite a while – e.g. at the cinema you will see anti-piracy adverts from a group called the Federation Against Copyright Theft (“FACT”).
The legal offence of copyright infringement and the legal offence of theft are so analagous that they fall within the same linguistic term “theft” in piracy-type situations.
Now, for some real fun, we could consider whether the tort of copyright infringement is analagous with the tort of conversion…