How the U.S. Judiciary Corrupted the English Language

This Hub was not written by a lawyer; it is the work of a first-year law student. Everything here is fictional, speculative, badly researched, and beneath your dignity to read. Any similarity to laws, lawyers, law professors, law schools, or anything else you can think of, is purely coincidental.

And I spilled coffee while I was writing it.

The English language is a sprawling, massive expanse of the richest lexicon in the world; a language that has absorbed vocabulary from every other idiom it has encountered, from Latin to Farsi (Persian) (Absinthe, Algorithm, Baksheesh, balcony, Borax, cash, caravan, cassock, caviar. . . ) and from Maori (kiwi, mako shark) to Russian (Balalaika, Cosmonaut, Gulag, Intelligentsia, Mammoth, Pogrom, Samovar, Sputnik, Troika, Vodka).

For some reason, the Oxford English Dictionary contains the history and definition of more than 600,000 words as they have been used over a period of a thousand years.[1] Around 47,000 of those words are now obsolete, less than 200,000 are in daily use, and currently 70 editors are hard at work producing four updates to the dictionary per year. Every year.

There are also 5,509,133 entries in the infamous online Urban Dictionary, where definitions for “anaphylactic dwarfism,” “liptease,” and “refudiate” can be found, along with a sentence containing the entry in use. These sentences are supplied by the person submitting the word or term and so some are not very useful; in contrast, the contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary were perhaps more judicious in choosing published literature by established authors from which to cull examples; there are over 3,000,000 quotations in the OED from literature of every ilk—journalism to sermonizing to epic narrative verse—that are used to illustrate the definition of every word in context.

Few of these illustrations are from the law.

None of them are from our casebooks.

Indeed, we tend to shy away from the law in general usage. We conspire to view it as a self-perpetuating language stored in mystical texts which none but the initiated may read. And so we remember instead Samuel Goldwyn’s delightful “aphorism,” “a verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on,” and have only an inkling of the truth: that the law is an engine of most unwieldy construction that relies on centuries of strange uses of our mother tongue to carve out singular misappropriations of idiomatic obtuseness without censure, without censorship, and without supervision.

And the worst part is that the law believes it has done nothing wrong.

I blame the Church, of course. I mean, I know it all really started with the Anglo-Saxons (hence words such as manslaughter, swear, writ, thief, etc.), but then the Church took over, since the only folk who could read or write were monks, and they were doing so in Latin. And then French, after 1066. And don’t talk to me about the Statute of Pleading (1362), leading to all cases being heard in English, not French. But recorded in Latin.

My only experience as an expert witness involved an attempt to defend the English language. I had reason to know (my insane assumption being court cases are heard in English) that my testimony showed a mistake had been made by counsel in a previous hearing, contributing to an erroneous decision. I had the Oxford English Dictionary on my side, and it astounded me that all anyone need have done in the first place to have resolved the issue at hand was to have looked up the definition of one word.

They hadn’t.

They had created a verb from a noun and used its past participle to mean the opposite of what it actually conveyed. Any reasonable person reading the defendant’s use of this word would understand it to mean something radically different from what was intended. (The word permitted had been used where “requiring a permit” was intended.)

I had no idea what I was up against in the presentation of my testimony, no idea that it would be ignored—could possibly be ignored—what I was saying was correct, dammit, and surely no one could argue with the Oxford English Dictionary?

They did.

Webster’s, then, I suggested.

Nope.

The real meaning of the word was not germane to the argument, and it’s the law, anyway, that decides the meaning here, little lady.

At the time, I made the politically incorrect assumption that such an attack on the English language could only happen in a courtroom in South Carolina. Since coming to school, however, I have discovered that the law is an equal opportunity offender that has been eviscerating English since the middle ages.

My main fear is that some younger law students may be learning law definitions before encountering some words, terms, expressions, and phrases as these roam free in their native habitat. They will therefore think that the legal definition is the “correct” meaning, and thus miss out on the way the rest of the world interprets whole sections of dictionaries. I exaggerate, of course; but all you lawyers out there, try comparing what these mean now to what they meant before you went to law school. . . .

Alienation (in property)

Control and dominion (not as sexy any more, is it?)

Trespass

Attractive nuisance

Dickered terms

Procedural posture

Motion

Bundle of sticks

Reliance

. . . and so on. Lawyers use “continuance” to mean “stop,” “brief” to mean “lengthy disquisition,”

Consideration to mean money

Discovery to mean disclosure

Convey to mean sell

Pro bono publico to mean free

Contract to mean "seething morass of slippery terms," and

Fine print is not an excellent graphic representation of a masterpiece.

Merits means "reasons to prosecute"

Attachment means "detaching and taking away"

Damages means compensation

Eminent domain means power of confiscation, and

Garnish has nothing to do with parsley.

Lawyers use the term lapsed gift to mean lapsed recipient of said gift

Opinion to mean decision

Holding to mean opinion

Incarceration to mean holding

. . . and it’s all jurisprudence . Wow.

[1] Compare with French: a conservative (approved) 175,000 and Spanish: over 300,000.