What’s new on the UK legal web? is a new weblog, but its author, Nick Holmes, has apparently been publishing a newsletter for some time now – back copies on the site. See also his infolaw site. A sort of British Langenhan.

Long since recorded by other bloggers, Son of law blog, Law-Blog (with capitals and a hyphen) is by the lawyers Arne Trautmann and Dr. Christian Ostermaier in Munich. Emphasis on IT, technology, intellectual and industrial property.

Via ethicalEsq & haikuEsq: the New York Lawyer reports that some big U.S. law firms are doing something to ensure their lawyers get more exercise. For instance, White & Case have a yoga night and a tai chi night.

bq. Washington, D.C.’s Arnold & Porter recently launched an incentive program that will pay associates and staff members a $200 bonus at the end of the year if they have exercised about three times a week over the year. The firm also holds health and fitness fairs and is looking into on-site fitness activities.

Die Kommentar-Funktion ist sehr langsam. Am einfachsten, wenn man kommentieren will, nicht auf “Comments”, sondern auf “Permalink” klicken, dann wird der ganze Eintrag mit früheren Comments in einem Fenster angezeigt.

The comments function is slow. Some people have left the same comment five times (I have then deleted four).

This is partly because I use the MT-Blacklist plugin for Movable Type.

The easiest way to comment is to click not on ‘Comments’, but on ‘Permalink’. Then you see a window with the entry and all the earlier comments.

I remove comments that are obvious spam. I also remove some comments that seem totally meaningless, but not many. I remove requests for work. I have not yet removed a couple of requests for legal advice. All these comments tend to appear on much earlier entries that few people are going to see.

An example: yesterday I removed two identical comments advertising a blackjack site. I entered the advertised URL into MT-Blacklist, and the poster tried ten more times to post, but was automatically blocked. If that hadn’t happened, I might have finished up having to delete 40 or 50 comments by hand, and that takes a long time. I can quickly edit the last 5 comments, but that’s all. That’s why I use MT-Blacklist, even though it probably slows things down. (I think there’s a scripting trick to speed things up again, but I don’t intend to use that because other things are more important).

But the results can be devastating if you don’t get your Teufelskralle in time.

Teufelskralle – Harpagophytum procumbens – devil’s claw or grapple plant.
Afrikanische Teufelskralle.

Very good if you’ve been attacked with a red felt marker.

Particular uses are for pains in the joints and rheumatism.

Manche Deutsche, wenn sie englisch schreiben, benutzen nur nicht-Muttersprachlern bekannte Wörter / Abkürzungen, z.B. resp., a.o., f. ex. und furtheron. Zitat von einem Engländer, der kein Deutsch kann und resp. überhaupt nicht verstehen konnte.

Ever since I first taught English to Germans – that was at Cologne University in 1974 – I have been amazed at people’s ability to regularly use non-existent English words.

When I don’t know a language well, I know there are words I lack, or I make spelling mistakes in existing words.

But who coined the word furtheron, which seems like a combination of weiterhin and furthermore?

And then there are all the abbreviations: f.ex. instead of e.g., and resp. standing for German beziehungsweise, which very rarely means respectively. Recently I saw a.o., clearly meaning among others. Of course, German unter anderem really means inter alia or among other things, not among others, so that too was misused.

For a summary of the problems with resp., see below.

Now I have read a query from someone on a forum with a German member whose English is very good. However, he keeps including the abbreviation ‘resp.’ in his postings, and English speakers can’t make sense of it. Here are two examples:

There are two kinds of suitable Polyurethane foam. One is single
component. Works well, only requires some water moisture resp. wetness to
react and set.

And I see that the vast majority of users resp. members still would like
to post ‘Wanted’ ads here.

To quote the questioner:

I thought at first it meant “with respect to”, but I think he’s actually using it to offer an alternative word for the one he has just used. I suspect he’s using a literal translation of a German abbreviation, but it doesn’t quite get his meaning across in English.

This is interesting, because every time I read resp. I know from German what the writer means. Beziehungsweise usually means and or or. But respectively has a narrower meaning:
‘each separately in the order mentioned’, to quote the Longmans Dictionary of Contemporary English. Example:

Classes A, B, and C will start their exams at 9.30, 10.00 and 10.30 respectively.

Beziehungsweise can mean this, but more often it is used the way the German uses resp. above: water or wetness, members or users.