Language Log

Sir William Jones, the great scholar of "eastern" languages routinely (though incorrectly) credited with discovering the Indo-European language family and founding modern historical linguistics, was by profession a lawyer. He learned Sanskrit as a judge in India. In his book Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and its Discontents, Robert Irwin reports (pp. 123-4) that:

At an early stage in his life, Jones's father had considered attaching him to a chambers to get a legal education, but Jones had resisted this on the understandable grounds that the quality of the Latin used in English law books was so very bad.

I don't think this excuse will work anymore.

Those of us who have been avoiding the use of transitive verbs because we thought they were argumentative or prejudicial can now rest easy. According to Superior Court Judge Timothy M. Frawley, they are not. He rendered his decision earlier this week, saying, “There is nothing inherently argumentative or prejudicial about transitive verbs.” This settles that long-standing linguistic controversy for good. If the Court decides it, it must be right. Right?

Several readers have encouraged me to tell a bit more about the right angle turn that led me into the field of forensic linguistics. It’s a long, strange story but I’ll try to hit the high spots here. If you’re interested you can find a more thorough report in my book, Creating Language Crimes (Oxford U Press 2005).

 After the man sitting next to on the airplane asked me to take a look at the tape-recorded evidence in a solicitation to murder case, I agreed to do so and a day or so later the lawyer in that case, Richard “Racehorse” Haynes, sent me the audio-tapes. The case was Texas v. T. Cullen Davis. The crucial conversations took place in Davis’s Cadillac, sitting in a sweltering Fort Worth parking lot.

According to the USPTO web site, the "Notice of Allowance" for Dell's attempt to trademark Cloud Computing has been cancelled.

I didn't intend an orgy of posts on English First, but one of the commenters on my previous post followed the link I gave to the English First site and in their issues section came upon H.R. 768, a bill "To provide that Executive Order 13166 shall have no force or effect, and to prohibit the use of funds for certain purposes", sponsored by no less than 55 Congresscritters. According to English First, "E.O. 13166 created an unlimited entitlement to services provided in a language other than English from all recipients of federal funds." This is simply not true.

In my post Trademark Insanity I came close to advocating the abolition of non-arbitrary trademarks. It turns out this proposal has been made in all seriousness by Lisa P. Ramsey in her paper Descriptive Trademarks and the First Amendment. Check it out.

The July/August issue of the APA's journal, Monitor, contains a report about that organization's amicus brief to the California Supreme Court concerning that state's ban on same-sex marriage. Citing this brief, the Court has now ruled 4 to 3 that restricting marriage to opposite sex couples violates California's constitution. The word, "marriage," formerly banned from use by a selected group of couples, is now unbanned.

During my many years serving as an expert witness I learned, among other things, that lawyers in one part of the US pronounce certain legal terms in ways that lawyers in other parts  of the country do not. My favorite is their variation in pronouncing voir dire. In most of the country I hear them say vwahr deer, more or less the French way, although some drop the "r" on the end of  voir. But in parts of the South this comes out more like vohr dyer, although sometimes you can hear a third syllable in the second word, making it sound like a private journal, a diary. 

Until recently, I hadn't thought much about the possibility that professionals, like doctors and lawyers, might have professional regional dialects. By this I don't mean the general regional dialects of their areas. Even US presidents speak some version of those. And I  don't mean saying "nucular" for "nuclear" or "gummit" for "government." Neither of these pronunciations seems to be regionally distributed. What I've begun to wonder is if there might be such things as Northern, North Midland, South Midland, and Southern versions of the legal expressions commonly used by lawyers.

It's bad enough that we have to deal with struggles over the use of trademarks that have become generic terms, like "Xerox" and "Coke", and trademarks that were already generic terms among specialists, such as "Windows", but a new low in trademarking has been reached by the joint efforts of Dell and the US Patent and Trademark Office. Cyndy Aleo-Carreira reports that Dell has applied for a trademark on the term "cloud computing". The opposition period has already passed and a notice of allowance has been issued. That means that it is very likely that the application will soon receive final approval.

Among the little known stories circulating recently, we learn from The Anchorage Daily News that the California Milk Processor Board, representing eleven dairy processors that market milk, is planning to bring trademark infringement charges against a batik artist in Talkeetna, Alaska. A few years ago, the artist, Barbara Holmes, whose company is Mountntop Designs & Baby Bugs Clothing, produced and advertised the slogan, "Got Breastmilk?" on tee-shirts and one-piece baby clothing called "onesies." CMPB's Sacramento law firm sent her one of those typical cease-and-desist warning letters to Holmes, telling her that her slogan will cause confusion with their own widely publicized and trademarked slogan, "Got Milk?" And she'd better stop doing this now, before they sue her.

The case of Nick vs. Bethel, a lawsuit by Yup'ik Eskimos against the city of Bethel, Alaska, has elicited a good bit of comment recently due to a recent ruling that Yup'ik is not a "historically written language". A not atypical example is this comment on an indigenous language mailing list to which I subscribe:

This ruling seems to express a deep bias of Western culture. That is, written language is taken to be the model product of language/cultural evolution overall. Certainly, one could say that as a ruling it not just discriminates against Yup'ik speakers, but against most all indigenous languages in general as well as against oral-based cultures world wide.

Few people commenting on this ruling seem to be familiar with the details of the case, which it is helpful to understand before forming an opinon.

Just about 13 years ago, O.J. Simpson defense attorney Johnnie Cochran made news with these words from his closing argument:

Remember these words: "if it doesn't fit, you must acquit". (.wav)

I'm not saying that this useful rhyme was the key to Simpson's acquittal, but it certainly stuck in people's minds. Together with images of O.J. struggling to put the gloves on, the significance of the ill-fitting glove evidence to the outcome of the trial is not a matter of significant debate. It certainly didn't hurt that Cochran was an effective speaker.

Compare this with yesterday's news reports of the opening statements from the trial of Osama bin Laden's driver Salim Hamdan, whose civilian defense attorney Harry Schneider has been quoted as follows:

The evidence is that he worked for wages, he didn't wage attacks on America […] He had a job because he had to earn a living, not because he had a jihad against America.

Get it? "he worked for wages" vs. "he didn't wage attacks" — see? "He had a job vs. "not because he had a jihad". See?

If this is the best Schneider can do against the prosecution's argument that Hamdan knew about "the dome" — which the U.S. prosecution team is arguing refers to the U.S. Capitol building (Navy Lt. Cmdr. Timothy Stone: "Virtually no one knew the intended target, but the accused knew") — then Hamdan looks to be in big trouble.

Here at Language Log we've commented a lot about the media's coverage of animal communication (birds, monkeys, cows, etc.) but, as far as I know, none of this has dealt with animals that actually swear oaths of office. So I'll remedy this omission by referring to a few media articles about police dogs that swear.

From Decatur, Georgia we read that a police dog is a "sworn officer." This article doesn't explain how the dog did the swearing, but the police must believe that he raised his front forepaw and did it somehow.