This continues my response last week 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. recently.
I’ll proceed giving my personal views 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.”
IMAGE CREDIT: EXAMPLES.YOURDICTIONARY.COM“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.COMFrom 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.
(Next:
How plain English and legalese differ, or vice versa- 3) September 9, 2021
This essay, 2061st of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the September 2, 2021 Internet edition of The Manila Times,
© 2021 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. Read this article online in
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How plain English and legalese differ, or vice versa- 2To listen to the audio version of this article, click the encircled double triangle logo in its online posting in
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