Gentlemen Cows, Mcjobs and the Speech Police: Curiosities About
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Gentlemen Cows, McJobs and the Speech Police: Curiosities about language and law by Roger W. Shuy 1 Table of contents 2 Introduction 6 Problems with legal expressions 7 Gentlemen cows and other dirty words 8 Are we inured yet? 10 Person of interest 13 Reading the government’s mind 16 Legal uses of and/or…or something 20 Pity the poor virgule 22 Water may or may not run through it 24 McMissiles in Virginia 27 What’s the use of “use” anyway? 30 Banned words in the courtroom 33 Un-banning a banned word 36 Banning “rape” in a rape trial 37 “Official” Hispanic interns 41 Don’t call me doctor or someone will call the police 44 Getting a hunting license in Montana 46 The great Montana parapet battle 52 Weak and wimpy language 54 2 Proximate cause 57 Justice Scalia’s “buddy-buddy” contractions 63 Reasonable doubt about reasonable doubt 66 Reasonable doubt or firmly convinced ? 70 Do we have to talk in order to remain silent? 74 Arizona knows 76 It’s only semantics 80 2 Problems with language in criminal cases 85 Speaking on behalf of 86 On explicitness and discourse markers 91 Not taking no for an answer 97 Speech events in a kickback case 100 The recency principle and the hit and run strategy 107 Meth stings in the state of Georgia 109 The Pellicano file 113 The DeLorean saga 116 BCCI in the news again 121 The futility of Senator Williams’ efforts to say no 124 On changing your mind in criminal cases 128 Texas v. T. Cullen Davis 133 3 Is there a coded language in the House? 145 Authorship identification in the news 155 Nailing a suspect through his writing 158 Treason in the Republic of Georgia 163 Do we have to talk in order to remain silent? 150 The Montana speech police 169 The perils of transcribing spoken language 171 3 Problems with identifying lying and perjury 175 When and when not to lie 176 How not to spot a liar 180 Arizona knows 180 Will your pronouns and verbs will give you away? 184 One rather late vote for truthiness 188 Inferences in perjury cases 190 Trick questions or perjury? 195 Memory lapses vs. perjury in Honolulu 198 Plagiarism and copyright 206 Section 4 Problems with language in civil cases 209 Plagiarism and copyright 210 Linguistics in the service of plane English 213 4 The sad anniversary of Air Florida flight 90 221 Benny, call home 227 The battle of the artificial sweeteners 229 If they lose your pants, sue 233 Judge loses his pants and suit 235 The moral of losing your pants, your suit, and your job 237 Warning labels and recalls: are we protected? 239 Bureaucratic language 243 The syntax conventions of menus 247 Knowing who can wash your windows 252 From Spam to McDonald’s in the trademark wars 256 Getting better McJobs 262 Got confusion? 266 Trademarks and generic names 269 5 Introduction This is a collection of short, personal essays about the ways language is being used in the legal context. It’s not an authoritative treatise on law and it’s not a comprehensive introduction to language. It’s an edited collection of some of the posts I’ve made in recent years on the blog-site, Language Log. Since 2006, I have been one of the 18 professional linguists on the Language Log staff who post whenever they feel they have something interesting to say about language. We write our posts for people who have little or no training in linguistics. Our intention is to make people aware of the importance of language in their daily lives, especially when they were mystified by some aspects of how people write and talk. We learned a lot from the thousands of responses we got from engineers, computer specialists, lawyers, physicians, academics, housewives, teachers, journalists, and many other readers whose questions and suggestions often inform us about what to write next. Here I try to show some of the mysterious ways lawyers and judges use legal language in criminal and civil cases, as well as how they deal with deception and lying. 6 1 Problems with legal words and expressions Most of the time we think we know what words mean and how to use them. But when we bump into expressions used by lawyers, we can get totally stumped. What counts as a dirty word? What happens when lawyers have different meanings from the words used by the rest of us? Which words are we not allowed to utter in the courtroom? Here are some of the problems that I’ve run into over my years of being an expert witness in law cases. No doubt there are many others, but here are some I’ve had to grapple with. What is a person of interest anyway? How does a word become “official”? How can I know what words or expressions I’m not allowed to use in the courtroom? What do they mean by “proximate cause” and “reasonable doubt?” And isn’t it illogical for suspects, after being given their Miranda right to remain silent, to then be required to talk in order to say that they do not waive this right? This section explores these and other mysteries of legal language. 7 Gentlemen cows and other dirty words Fifty years ago, my day job was to conduct field interviews of older residents in rural areas Illinois as my part of the research for the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada. The Atlas was trying to document the words, expressions, and pronunciations of older residents who had lived in the same general area all their lives. This proved to be a fascinating experience for me, since I had lived in large cities all his life. But my background actually made me a good field interviewer because I knew nothing about farming and other aspects of rural life and my ignorance actually caused me to ask rather mundane questions about such things as what the farmers called the utensil they use to fry eggs in, the machinery they use to reap their crops, and what they call their animals. I haven’t done linguistic geography since those halcyon days, but this New York Times (May 2, 2009) article about the controversy over FCC’s crackdown the Bono Rule, on the use of dirty words(see the Wall Street Journal, November 4, 2008), brought back some fond memories. The article quoted prominent lexicographer, Jesse Sheidlower, who calmly identified as “rubbish” the FCC’s 2007 ruling that one particular word (you can guess which word they meant) invariably evokes a coarse sexual 8 image. Jesse argued that although this word originally referred to a sexual act, it has now taken on an independent emotional nonsexual sense, shown by the example of then Vice President Dick Cheney’s admonition that Senator Patrick Leahy could go commit an anatomically impossible act. The referential function of that word has simply changed, which seems to be hard for many people, including the FCC, to comprehend. But let me get back to my Illinois dialect research. When I asked the old farmers what they called the male bovine animal, I made good use of my city-bred ignorance by phasing my question, “What do you call a male cow?” That always brought a smile, along with a bit of sympathy for my ignorance. But it yielded a good answer anyway, which was as likely to be “gentleman cow” as “bull.” Victorian era prudishness still lingered in the minds of the “gentleman cow” speakers, along with “white meat” for the breast of chickens, “cut” or “alter” for castrate, and other delicate verbal detours around anything that even hinted of things sexual. Prescriptivism is alive and well at the FCC, and Justice Scalia firmly asserts that this taboo word in contention “invariably invokes a coarse sexual image.” I suppose he might argue the same for “bull,” “chicken breast” and “castrate.” Too strong for mixed company. 9 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Are we inured yet? The December 15, 2008 issue of Newsweek contained an article called, “Desperate Housewares”, a catchy title that plays off the name of a popular television program called “Desperate Housewives” (full disclosure: I’ve never watched this program but I do subscribe to Newsweek). In the article was this sentence: Shoppers seem inured to the relentless Christmas spirit. From this I’d guess that most readers understand that shoppers are accustomed to and even accept this relentless Christmas spirit and that it’s not a good thing– except perhaps for the retail trades. Inure, that is, conveys something negative here. Hold that thought while I describe a very different use of inure. Recently I helped the Montana Department of Revenue revise the thousand or so letters the tax experts mail out to wary taxpayers. This was an interesting experience with many back-stories. But for now, let me cite the 10 following sentence that appeared in a number of letters sent to corporations about their tax status: No part of the net income of a Montana tax-exempt organization can inure to the benefit of any private stockholder or individual. So now we see two somewhat dissimilar meanings of inure (both are given in Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, by the way). Inure conveys something bad when shoppers are inured to the relentless Christmas spirit. On the other hand, to these tax people inure can convey an advantage or benefit that stockholders or individuals might obtain in their business lives.