Words Used and Abused

• Pages: 51-103

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chapter two

A. INTRODUCTION

Writer is an old Scottish term for “solicitor,” and the word is well-

chosen. The careful lawyer thinks about what words mean and

how they will be interpreted — or may be misinterpreted. And yet,

modern lawyers frequently misuse the wordhoard that is avail-

able to them, whether this is through force of (unthinking) habit,

imprecise thinking, confusion, or simple error.

B. MISUSE

1) Gruesome Twosomes

What do I mean by this? These are pairs of words that lawyers rou-

tinely use together, but would be better not to. These pairs may

once have had distinct meanings (in the late Middle Ages?), but

now really don’t.

And even in the Middle Ages, they may not have: many of these

“coupled synonyms” (as the late Richard Wydick called them) join

an English word with its (Old) French equivalent, in a belt-and-

suspenders manoeuvre1 — for example, like free and clear, which

1 Richard Wydick, Plain English for Lawyers, 5th ed (Durham, NC: Carolina

Academic Press, 2005) at 18.

Words Used and Abused

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Guthrie's Guide to Better Legal Writing

combines the synonymous Old English freo and the Old French cler.

Further examples will be discussed below.

a) Redundancy

Linguistic redundancy, not the employment variety. In the linguis-

tic category, there are both legal and non-legal redundancies.

The legal

Legalese is replete with pairs of words that mean the same thing

and therefore don’t need to be used together (except to create a

leaden, lawyerly eect).

zNull and void [how about of no eect?]

zNo force or eect [ditto]

zAny and all [any covers one or more, so and all adds nothing]

zSave and except [one or the other, not both]

zFull and complete [same comment]

zPlain and obvious [synonymous]

zUnless and until [this drives me crazy]

zSeparate and apart [except as a term of art in family law]

zCease and desist [plain old stop will do just ne]

zClosest and most real connection2

These are redundant and inelegant, they don’t reect how normal

people (like clients) actually speak, and they make your writing look

fussy.

The non-legal

Writing that is non-lawyerly (or not exclusively lawyerly) also suf-

fers from redundancies. Here are some common ones:

zabsolutely necessary [you need something or you don’t]

zadded bonus [a bonus is always added]

zarmed gunman

zblue in colour [no, it’s just blue]

zclose proximity

2 I am grateful to my friend and colleague Angela Swan for reminding me

of this one.

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Chapter Two: Words Used and Abused

zduring the course of [please, just during]

zeach and every

zexact same

zface mask [where else?]

zfull gamut [there are no partial gamuts (or spectrums, for that

matter)]

zgeneral consensus [consensus is, by denition, general]

zmental telepathy [telepathy is communication from one mind

to another; it’s always mental]

zmoment in time [a moment is, perforce, in time]

zmore or most fundamental [you’ve reached the bottom or you

haven’t]

znew recruit

zoutward appearance [can there be an inward one?]

zpersonal belongings [unless you’re nicking someone else’s stu

from the overhead compartment, I guess]

zpersonal opinion [it’s no one else’s]

zPIN number [what do you think the N stands for?]

zpre-heat, pre-arrange, pre-existing, pre-owned, pre-plan, pre-prepared

[all of these involve a prior action or condition before some-

thing else happens; pre- is unnecessary]

zreason why

zrole model [just model, which doesn’t mean only the runway

kind — “The rapper is not perhaps the best model for young

people”]

zsafe haven [yeah, you want to avoid the unsafe ones]

zsoftware programme [that’s what software is]

zsum total [that’s like saying debit decit]

ztime period [one or the other; they mean the same thing]

zterminal building [a terminal is a building]

zUnited Together [optimistic but perhaps ill-advised slogan of

the 2016 Democratic National Convention; as opposed to?]

zvery true [the truth is not relative]

zvery [or any other modier] unique [something is unique or

it ain’t]

zweather conditions [weather is a condition, and the conditions

would generally include the weather]