Part I:
Taken aback by an English professor's legal writing lecture
A Forum member—I’ll identify him here only as Justine to protect him from possible brickbats—related to me sometime in 2021 that owing to his current work, he had obligated himself to attend a recent lecture on legal writing by an English professor from a prestigious law school.
I was admittedly taken aback when Justine asked me if I would agree with that legal English lecturer’s very contentious rules on the construction and length of sentences and her downright dismissal of the interjection as a legitimate part of speech.
That lecturer’s stern prescriptions are these:
1. “Yes” can’t be considered as a sentence because a sentence should at least contain three words and should follow an S-V-O pattern;
2. A sentence must have as much as possible 20 words to be clear, simple and direct; and
3. The interjection shouldn’t be considered as part of speech because, according to a certain F.J.Rahtz, it is just “a noisy utterance like the cry of an animal.”
My reply to Justine:
1. My answer to the first question is a categorical “No!” Definitely, “Yes” qualifies as a sentence. The argument that a sentence “should at least contain three words and... should follow an S-V-O pattern” is so old school and so persnickety. I can only presume that that lecturer is way, way over her senior citizen year—not that I’m not anywhere in or beyond that age bracket myself—or that if she’s a fresh AB English graduate, she must have learned English from a professor way past retirement age to even think of that nonsense definition.
That English lecturer’s overly fastidious pronouncement goes against the grain of the very definition of the term “sentence.” My Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate Dictionary defines it as “a word, clause, or phrase or a group of clauses or phrases forming a syntactic unit which expresses an assertion, a question, a command, a wish, an exclamation, or the performance of an action, that in writing usually begins with a capital letter and concludes with appropriate end punctuation, and that in speaking is distinguished by characteristic patterns of stress, pitch, and pauses.”
That definition’s very first two words—“a word”—already qualifies “Yes” as a sentence because even if it’s just one word, it’s naturally written or uttered by someone in response to an understood subject and verb associated with it. The implied “I agree with that” already satisfies the demand of that legal English lecturer that it “follow an S-V-O pattern.” In fact, it even exceeds that basic pattern by an extra word.
2. Regarding your second question, I totally disagree that “a sentence must contain as much as possible 20 words to be clear, simple and direct.” For saying that, I seriously think she should be reported to her school’s law dean to be chastised for grossly wrongheaded teaching on how long or short sentences should be—whether the English is plain, simple English or abstruse legalese. (You may want to send her a link to my Forum posting on “How long should a sentence be to effectively deliver an idea?”
3. As to your third question, Justine, I won't be drawn into an argument with anyone who thinks that interjections don’t qualify as a part of speech for being just “a noisy utterance like the cry of an animal.” I’m content and won’t quibble with my Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate definition that an interjection is “an ejaculatory utterance usually lacking grammatical connection, as a word or phrase used in exclamation (as ‘Heavens!’ ‘Dear me!’).”
That definition has served me well and had never failed me in all the years that I’ve been using interjections to express shock or delight over the many unexpected things that most everyone encounters in life.
Part II:
A personal working definition of “plain and simple English”
This continues my response to the very staid and draconian English writing rules prescribed by that lady English professor in her legal writing lecture attended by Forum member Justine A. in 2021.
I’ll proceed by giving my personal views but with this caveat: I’m not a lawyer and haven’t dreamed nor aimed to be one. There just may be aspects of English legalese that that professor knows so intimately but that I as a layman really have neither need nor immediate use for.
To avoid misunderstandings, I’m presenting my personal working definition of “plain and simple English” along with authoritative definitions of the terms that will figure in these discussions, namely (1) legalese, (2) jargon, and (3) gobbledygook.
For plain and simple English, here’s my definition: It’s the human way of speaking and writing in English—simple, clear, sincere, courteous and with absolutely no artifice, pretense, and pomposity. It’s the same everyday English we use when talking face-to-face with people honestly and with mutual respect and trust.
“Legalese” is formally defined by my Merriam Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary as “the specialized language of the legal profession.” Informally, the reference book Oxford Languages defines the term as “the formal and technical language of legal documents that is often hard to understand.”
“Jargon” is formally defined by my Merriam Webster’s 11th Collegiate in four ways: “1 a: confused unintelligible language b: a strange, outlandish, or barbarous language or dialect c: a hybrid language or dialect simplified in vocabulary and grammar and used for communication between peoples of different speech; 2 : the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group; 3 : obscure and often pretentious language marked by circumlocutions and long words.”
“Gobbledygook” is formally defined by my same dictionary simply as “wordy and generally unintelligible jargon.” More extensively, Oxford Languages defines it as “language that is meaningless or is made unintelligible by excessive use of abstruse technical terms; nonsense.”
IMAGE CREDIT: SLIDEPLAYER.COM
From the above definitions, we can safely say that “legalese” is the jargon of lawyers for communicating with fellow lawyers and related practitioners. When using legalese, the lawyer presumes that the reader or listener is adequately knowledgeable with legal concepts that laypeople like you and me would find too wordy for comfort and beyond comprehension.
It’s tempting to say that lawyers use legalese so only they themselves can interpret legal documents or their court pleadings, but that thought would be a patently unfair. More levelheaded is this justification for legalese by an anonymous lawyer-blogger: “In law, words have very specific and clearly defined meanings, and lawyers are careful when drafting legal documents to say precisely what they mean, even if the meaning is only apparent to other lawyers. Some of the word use may appear unusual to people who aren’t familiar with the law, as ordinary words can have a different meaning in a legal context.”
Among Filipino lawyers, I don’t think it’s standard practice to deliberately make contracts and documents wordy, roundabout, and confusing. If they engage in legalese, it could only be the outcome of decades of overzealous, overprecise, and overbearing formulation, interpretation, and application of the law. In fact, there has been a very strong trend in North America and the United Kingdom—they are now huge movements spearheaded by both lawyers and nonpayers—to promote the use of plain and simple English not only in contracts and legal documents but also in court litigation and legislation—the better for laypeople to understand, appreciate, and follow the law.
So I find it truly puzzling why in the recent lecture attended by Justine A., that English professor appears to be headed in the opposite direction by complexifying legal writing with her very staid and draconian prescriptions.
Part III:
When English cum jargon veers toward gibberish or gobbledygook
For nearly two decades now since I started writing this column, I would encounter much too often not only legalese and jargon—the abstruse English of the law and jurisprudence—but also their kindred baffling specimens that I pejoratively label as academese, bureaucratese, and corporatese. At their most incomprehensible extremes, of course, they veer toward the gibberish or nonsense known as gobbledygook.
FORMS OF LEGALESE IN PHILIPPINE JURISPRUDENCE
(Above, left photo)
CLEAR, UNDERSTANDABLE LEGALESE:
Jurisprudence on social justice
"The policy of social justice is not intended to
countenance wrongdoing simply because
it is committed by the underprivileged."
[G.R. No. 184011, September 18, 2013]
(Above, right photo)
TOUGH LEGALESE BORDERING ON JARGON:
Jurisprudence on marital incapacity
"Emotional immaturity and irresponsibility could
not be equated with psychological Incapacity."
[G.R. No. 171557, February 12, 2014]
I recall that back in 2003, my son Carlo who was then a high school junior brought to my attention this English sentence that he thought was “very impressive” but couldn’t seem to understand: “Basically, globalization indicates a qualitative deepening of the internationalization process, strengthening the functional and weakening the territorial dimension of development.”
After quickly going over the sentence, I told him that the educator who wrote that convoluted academese—it was in a scholarly article in a major national newspaper’s op-ed page—probably meant to say this: “Globalization is a deeper form of internationalization, one where a nation’s drive for development becomes more important than its territorial size,” or, in even simpler English, that “A nation can be small but it can become a major world economic power.”
IMAGE CREDIT: EDUCBA.COM
“That certainly makes sense,” my son said, “but why do these educators say it the way they do? They are writing not only for English experts but also for people like me, aren’t they? Why then use such fuzzy words as ‘qualitative deepening’ and ‘territorial dimension of development’?”
“Son, this article was not written for you,” I replied. “It was probably written with the best intentions for their fellow educators and higher-ups, but somehow it landed on this newspaper without being adapted and edited for readers like us.”
At least until about 20 years ago—that was before the plain and simple English movement started in the United States—bureaucratese like the sentence that follows below lorded it over in federal trade communication:
“Purification of unliquidated obligations is essential for the early identification and correction of invalid obligation amounts to ensure full and effective fund utilization.”
In plain and simple English, that statement is probably saying this: “To make sure that our funds are fully and effectively utilized, unliquidated expenses and invalid claims must be identified and rectified right away.”
IMAGE CREDIT: SLIDESERVE.COM
Worse yet is this bureaucratic reply—it almost borders on gobbledygook—by an American military general to a subordinate’s request way back in the 1980s:
“Because of your predisposition to your position’s productive capacity, it would momentarily be injudicious, as per government standards, to advocate an increment.”
What the military general probably meant to say was simply this:
“You don’t deserve a pay increase now because of your poor performance in your position.”
But are we in the Philippines any better in our law and jurisprudence by using—if not plain and simple English—at least clear and fathomable legalese? I was hoping that we have made great progress on this aspect until a Forum member brought to my attention this Supreme Court jurisprudence about “consignation” (GR L-8496, April 25, 1956):
“(T)he disagreement between a lessor and a lessee as to the amount of rent to be paid by a lessee cannot be decided in an action of consignation but in that of forcible entry and unlawful detainer that the lessor institutes when the lessee refuses to pay the lessor the rents that he has fixed for the property.”
Honestly, I thought the grammar and syntax of that piece of jurisprudence were scrupulously correct and beyond reproach, so I actually made every effort to make its sense clearer. Until this time, though, I’m still scratching my head over the complicated, mind-bending justification for how our very own Supreme Court had ruled in such cases.
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This three-part exposition first appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the September 9, 2021 Internet edition of The Manila Times,© 2021 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
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