A translator on the pt mailing list (at Yahoo Groups) needs to translate into German a text in which two people argue about whether the drink egg cream contains eggs or cream. (This reminds me of asking the Turkish butcher ‘what are those?’ recently and being told ‘Lammeier’ – I wondered where the nest was). To quote Tony the Tour Guy:

bq. It isn’t made with eggs, or cream. This famous soda fountain concoction was a favorite for many of us, and is currently enjoying a comeback in many restaurants and diners. A mixture of milk, syrup and seltzer water, just how it got its name is one of those things nobody seems to know for sure.

So what would work in German? I could only think of Leberkäse, which is not a drink. It contains neither liver nor cheese, at least in Bavaria it doesn’t. This is reminiscent of the U.S. head cheese.

Suggestions included Alsterwasser, kalter Kaffee, and then a whole list of bizarre names (Blutgeschwür – Advokaat with a shot of cherry brandy, Tote Tante – North Frisian drink of hot cocoa with rum).

But I suppose most cocktails have names like that.

For microscope photos of cocktails, see here.

Mark Liberman at Language Log establishes that the noun phrase ‘bright line’ and the adjective ‘bright-line’ are missing in most general English dictionaries:

bq. Here’s another common expression that’s not in the standard dictionaries: bright line, in the sense of “clear criterion of demarcation”.You won’t find it in the American Heritage Dictionary (fourth edition), Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged (third edition), Encarta, or the Oxford English Dictionary, but it’s widely used these days. Google has 193,000 hits for “bright line”, a substantial fraction of which seem to be instances of this expression. Searching today’s Google News brings up 104 examples, and Technorati finds 20 blog examples in the past three days.

As he says, you can work out the meaning from the Google examples.

The term is a U.S. one afaik. It’s in Black’s Law Dictionary, though only since the 7th ed., i.e. post-Garner. It’s in Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of Law. I can’t find it in Gifis (Barron’s) Law Dictionary, though. And I can’t find it in any bilingual law dictionaries.

bq. (Though Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of Law, 1996 edition, has no entry for this term.)

Hmm.

Still, it can be found. German general dictionaries have a special rule of not allowing specialist terminology in. So the German equivalent of ‘bright line’, if there were one, might be found in a German law dictionary like Creifelds or Alpmann-Schmidt, but some verbs and adjectives with a specific use in legal texts won’t be found anywhere. To say nothing of Austrian and Swiss terminology that you can’t even find in Austrian and Swiss law dictionaries.

I have now found an entry in Garner’s Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage:

bq. bright-line rule = a judicial rule of decision that is simple and straightforward and that avoids or ignore the ambiguities or difficulties of the problems at hand. The phrase dates from the mid-20th century. The metaphor of a bright line is somewhat older than the phrase bright-line rule – e.g.: “The difficult part of this case comes with regard to … the activity of the Board of Temperance ….A bright line between that which brings conviction to one person and its influence on the body politic cannot be drawn.” Girard Trust Co. v. I.R.C., 122 F.2d 108, 110 (3d Cir. 1941)./”[T]he McCambridge majority opinion … agrees that the Kirby bright-line-rule is but a mere formalism ….” J.G.Trichter, Bright-Lining Away the Right to Counsel, Tex. Law., 6 Nov. 1989, at 26. Cf. hard and fast rule.

A statute to change a term in earlier statutes is apparently unable to summarize this in two paragraphs, but instead takes 23 pages to describe each individual change in every grammatical case.

Ein Artikel von Friedrich Kiechle, Vorsitzender Richter am Verwaltungsgericht Berlin, Umbenennung als Herkuleswerk, erschien in der FAZ am 27. Juli (für EUR 0,85 aus dem Archiv zu bekommen). Das Gesetz zur Umbenennung des Bundesgrenzschutzes in Bundespolizei hat eine Länge von 23 Seiten im Bundesgesetzblatt (hier als nicht-ausdruckbare-PDF-Datei zu finden):

bq. In … werden jeweils die Wörter ‘Der Bundesgrenzschutz’, ‘der Bundesgrenzschutz’, ‘Dem Bundesgrenzschutz’, ‘dem Bundesgrenzschutz’, ‘den Bundesgrenzschutz’, ‘vom Bundesgrenzschutz’, ‘des Bundesgrenzschutzes’, durch die Wörter ‘Die Bundespolizei’, ‘die Bundespolizei’, ‘Der Bundespolizei’, ‘die Bundespolizei’, ‘von der Bundespolizei’, ‘der Bundespolizei’, sowie jeweils das Wort ‘Er’, ‘er’, ‘seine’ durch das Wort ‘Sie’, ‘sie’, ‘ihre’ ersetzt.

Das wurde nicht immer so gehandhabt:

bq. Immerhin steht etwa bis zum heutigen Tag in Paragarph 23 des Bürgerlichen Gesetzbuches, daß “einem Vereine, der seinen Sitz nicht in einem Bundesstaate hat, … in Ermangelung besonderer reichsgesetzlicher Vorschriften Rechtsfähigkeit durch Beschluß des Bundesrats verliehen werden (kann)” – und nimmt damit auf Verfassungsinstitutionen des Kaiserreiches Bezug …

When I translated a brochure for the Wartburg including a description of the collections, I had problems finding a term for Martin Luther’s Reiselöffel. This just shows how hard things were before the Internet, because today I can find all kinds of folding spoons, but then, the term didn’t occur to me until it was too late.

Martin Luther’s spoon:

Not only are there plastic spoons:

but there are even fake medieval spoons for your medieval table:

Then again, one could go straight to a lawyer whose hobby is spoons (lots of spoon links).

(Via Udo Vetter – see also this link, given in the comments, with a picture of the largest spoon carved by Horst Wesemann)

Das Court of Appeal in London hat drei Urteile von Judge Nicholas Medawar QC aufgehoben. Viele gegen den Richter gemachte Vorwürfe seien nicht bewiesen worden, aber es könne nie zumutbar sein, wenn der Richter dem Anschein nach eher die Anklagevertretung unterstützt als die Verteidigung. Auch empfiehlt es sich nicht, während der Verteidiger vorträgt, mit den Augen zu rollen, den Kopf zu schütteln und den Füller hinzuwerfen.

Dazu ein nicht ganz ernst gemeinter Kommentar:

bq. If m’lud in future can’t tap an index finger to his temple to indicate that he thinks a witness is a complete raving loony, it seems a poor state of affairs. One of the primary weapons a judicial system has against the criminal classes is fear. Let us put it bluntly. The more quixotic judges are allowed to be, the more bloody frightening they are. It’s no good having courts run by calm, objective non-entities.

(See also earlier entry)

IPKAT reports on the evidence relied on when the application to register ‘Dykes on bikes’ was refused. Apparently there were over 400 pages of submissions, but the US Patent and Trademark Office relief on two dictionary definitions. One of these was from an online version of the 1913 Webster’s dictionary (whatever that is – was ‘Webster” copyrighted then? because it isn’t now). The online version included arbitrary additions, however, bearing the tag of Patrick J. Cassidy:

bq. Terms in the dictionary bearing his “tag” indicate that they were not, in fact, part of the original dictionary he had transcribed online but rather something that he himself had arbitrarily added. So in essence, the PTO relied on a definition that was created at random by someone not at all associated with Webster’s dictionary. The second definition the PTO relied on came from an online dictionary of Spanish slang that listed “dyke” as a “vulgar word.” Once again there was no accountability for the definition — it was just one person’s site giving what they consider vulgar words in Spanish.

Previously approved trademarks include Hustler’s Young Sluts, Psychic Phone Whores and Psychobitch, which all contain words regarded as vulgar by that dictionary.

There must be a doctorate going on the topic of judges and dictionaries.