I would like to enter this friendly fray in defense of legalese. Rebecca Wheeler makes an excellent point about the audience. I would like to extend those comments to include the purpose for writing and the weaknesses of ordinary language. The purpose of legal language is to specify unambiguously what must or must not be done. In reading 'ordinary prose' we are content to allow the context to provide clues to the meaning of individual sentences. In reading great literature, we expect writers to communicate more indirectly, making us rely on a very wide context. However, to make the interpretation of legal documents depend on the context (even in the narrow, textual sense of 'context') would be disasterous for our society, and could lead to despotism. [Look at how upset some people get at Supreme Court decisions based on certain 'loose interpretations' of the Constitution.] In short, legal language must be as unambiguous as possible. Now, that is just one of the greatest weaknesses of human language: it is hopelessly ambiguous. Ambiguity is one of those things that make language so useful for us (cf. the comments of French sociologist Jacques Ellul in _The Humiliation of the Word_--chapter one). The attempt to eliminate ambiguity is what makes legal language so tedious. Linguist William O'Grady writes: "It's surprisingly easy to write an article in which every sentence is ambiguous. It's much harder--maybe even impossible--to write one that isn't ambiguous, or to write anything that isn't ambiguous. Maybe this explains why...our court system is so clogged (obstructed, that is, not filled with Dutch wooden shoes)...." [Contemporary Linguistics, 3rd ed.]. We taxpayers and citizens love to have loopholes for people like us. We would like to have those ambiguities removed that provide loopholes for "them" to take "unfair advantage of." My advice for instructing lawyers about English usage is that when their audience is the 'general public' and their purpose is to inform the public about legal matters, they need to monitor the language they are using with the public: without being too tedious, try not to mislead us with ambiguous statements. [They could practice by doing 'translation exercises'--from legalese to public language--but, of course, they would 'lose something in the translation.' Can they identify what they have lost?] However, when lawyers write those laws, they should hone the ability to close loopholes with unambiguous, tedious language--an unnatural creature, to be sure, but a necessary evil. ********************************************************************** R. Michael Medley VPH 211 Ph: (712) 737-7047 Assistant Professor Northwestern College Department of English Orange City, IA 51041 **********************************************************************