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Confused Language Leads to Confused Thought
In my professional career as a lawyer, I usually opposed stereotypical “lawyerly” language. No “party of the first part, party of the second part” language, and definitely no passive verbs (“such and such will be completed by specified date”). For much of my career, I was on staff (in-house) at large corporations, where I wrote business contracts and advised business executives. In writing business contracts, I considered it essential that all parties to the contract knew exactly which party was responsible for which task to which specification by which deadline. I used the names of the parties throughout the contract. Every task was expressed with which party was to do an active verb that constituted the task. [I provoked some inadvertently funny discussions when my attempts to be specific revealed that the negotiating parties had very different ideas about who was going to do certain tasks.]
Business executives I advised needed clear summaries about whether an action they were thinking about was consistent with an existing contract, or consistent with existing law, or what the probabilities and options were if the contact or law was not clear. Unclear language in laws, court decisions, and contracts kept frustrating me.
New Yawk English. You know it when you hear it. It is unique and serves as a cultural marker.
I’ve been engaged in a pair of interesting conversations lately with people whose views are, shall we say, somewhere to the left of my own — and yes, I know that’s a pretty big crowd — about the meanings of words. Specifically, we’ve been talking about “sex” and “violence.”
