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From the Michigan Law Journal, 5/97, written by one Alan Falk, a Commissioner of the MI Court of Appeals, in Lansing... as a letter to the editor of same.
"On behalf of abecedarians and logodaedalophiles, I rise to denounce the paraphasts who wish to foist a "Plain English" law upon us.
Never mind that these soi-disant aolists have battologically assailed us in the pages of our professional journal, condemning the lexiphanes and logodaedalist with the same broad brush, in a feeding frenzy of ergotismic bootstrapping.
Must we all be consigned to become monoglots? There is an anecdote in the banking industry. It seems a large East-coast bank was expanding and planning to buy a small western financial institution. The accountants from the home office were going over the books, trying to put a price tag on the transaction. They found that a great deal of collateral loans were "eewees" (they were cacoepists, suffering from otosis). After much confusion, they were overhead by the janitor, who knew the word for an adult female sheep ("ewe") when he heard it. What is "common and everyday" language to the logomachists advocating a Plain
English Law may be inadequate to the task for we lesser mortals, who have come to appreciate that the right terminology, supported by commonly available lexicographic sources, is preferable to the periphrasis of writing everything in crayon.
Let's do away with these somniloquent spintexts and quodlibertarians, the way comedian Stan Freeburg did with "Mr. Tweeter", who wanted to bowdlerize the song "Old Man River" ("Elderly Man River, that Elderly Man River, he doesn't know anything, he doesn't say anything...")
The Plain English Movement achieves an acme of risibility when its own purveyors acknowledge ("Why We Need a Plain English Law") that even they cannot wholly explain what their own Michigan bill, if enacted, would mean.
Shunting aside the ironic hypocrisy, the jurisprudentially sensitive will be alert to the fact that such a law violates elementary notions of due process, and would consequently be void for vagueness, since people of common understanding would necessarily have to guess at its meaning.
Let, therefore, these engastrimyths speak for the xylophalic, not for those of us who use, understand, and appreciate the mellifluous, the alliterative, and the lexi-cographically precise."
only a few people can understand this. i'm one of the few, are you?
"On behalf of abecedarians and logodaedalophiles, I rise to denounce the paraphasts who wish to foist a "Plain English" law upon us.
Never mind that these soi-disant aolists have battologically assailed us in the pages of our professional journal, condemning the lexiphanes and logodaedalist with the same broad brush, in a feeding frenzy of ergotismic bootstrapping.
Must we all be consigned to become monoglots? There is an anecdote in the banking industry. It seems a large East-coast bank was expanding and planning to buy a small western financial institution. The accountants from the home office were going over the books, trying to put a price tag on the transaction. They found that a great deal of collateral loans were "eewees" (they were cacoepists, suffering from otosis). After much confusion, they were overhead by the janitor, who knew the word for an adult female sheep ("ewe") when he heard it. What is "common and everyday" language to the logomachists advocating a Plain
English Law may be inadequate to the task for we lesser mortals, who have come to appreciate that the right terminology, supported by commonly available lexicographic sources, is preferable to the periphrasis of writing everything in crayon.
Let's do away with these somniloquent spintexts and quodlibertarians, the way comedian Stan Freeburg did with "Mr. Tweeter", who wanted to bowdlerize the song "Old Man River" ("Elderly Man River, that Elderly Man River, he doesn't know anything, he doesn't say anything...")
The Plain English Movement achieves an acme of risibility when its own purveyors acknowledge ("Why We Need a Plain English Law") that even they cannot wholly explain what their own Michigan bill, if enacted, would mean.
Shunting aside the ironic hypocrisy, the jurisprudentially sensitive will be alert to the fact that such a law violates elementary notions of due process, and would consequently be void for vagueness, since people of common understanding would necessarily have to guess at its meaning.
Let, therefore, these engastrimyths speak for the xylophalic, not for those of us who use, understand, and appreciate the mellifluous, the alliterative, and the lexi-cographically precise."
only a few people can understand this. i'm one of the few, are you?
