Articles Tagged with Words

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It’s not an insult, although it could be.

I ran across the word in a recent Christopher Fowler Bryant and May novel (this one was Wild Chamber, but they are all excellent! – each one different, each one fall over funny, dark, wise, and each will make you say, “you too!” when you read/hear Fowler gently poke a stick at the ridiculous, the incomprehensible, the rubbish-talkers) and looked up the word “quango.” Good word, isn’t it, you quango, you.

Anyway, it’s an acronym (which can be distinguished from an abbreviation, in case you thought the two were synonyms – they are not (and for extra credit, the words amuse and bemuse are not synonyms either to the “strictly speaking” among us, although you can render someone bemused by using the two words interchangeably)).

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If nothing else, lawyers and judges care about what words mean:

SPORTS: What Exactly Is ‘Locker-Room Talk’? Let an Expert Explain,” by Bill Pennington, Oct.10, 2016, New York Times:

“….Having just left the locker room after his team’s victory over the Broncos in Denver on Sunday night, Tamme wrote: “I showered after our game but I feel like I need another one after watching the debate.” [Link to NYT article.]

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Do you ever notice that new words come to one’s attention in waves?

I’ve run across this word several times in the past few weeks – and it’s not one to trip off the tongue, so to speak, with any regularity, although maybe it should: misprision

Wikipedia entry: “Misprision (from Old French: mesprendre, modern French: se méprendre, “to misunderstand”) is a term of English law used to describe certain kinds of offence. Writers on criminal law usually divide misprision into two kinds, negative or positive….”

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An OSB editor takes to task users of the term “and/or”  – and makes a practical suggestion on how to avoid driving your editor mad:

“…. So how do you avoid this problem? The answer, as the muttering editor will tell you, is to simply say what you mean. If you mean or, say or; if you mean and, say and; if you mean one or the other or both, say just that. For example, the defendant may be charged with unlawful arrest or malicious prosecution, or both….”  [Link to the OSB Legal Pubs blog post and/or.]

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From the ABA Journal News: “How is ‘certiorari’ pronounced? Even Supreme Court justices disagree,” Jun 17, 2014, by Debra Cassens Weiss

Excerpt: “.... He listened to the U.S. Supreme Court’s oral arguments to learn the uniform pronunciation and instead found a six-way split of opinion, the National Law Journal reports. Black’s Law Dictionary also fails to settle the dispute, Duane writes in an article for Green Bag (PDF). It lists three pronunciations as acceptable….” [Link to full article.]

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You might not have read this chapter book, Frindle, by Andrew Clements, but …

Lawyers aren’t the only ones who want to know Definitions, Words & Phrases, and the Meaning of it All (and even the Meaning of Liff itself). Non-attorneys frequently ask us to show them where a word or phrase is defined, surely one of the hardest things a law librarian has to explain to a pro se litigant.

You might want to read this article, just one of many where the courts have to figure out what the meaning of a word is:

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