Cyprus, Cypress, whatever…

November 2, 2017 @ 3:46 pm · Filed by under Language and the law

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November 2, 2017 @ 3:46 pm · Filed by under Language and the law


19 Comments

  1. J.W. Brewer said,

    November 2, 2017 @ 4:13 pm

    1. It's likely that at some earlier stage the document (as a result of having been edited by different people) was internally inconsistent and someone decided to make it consistent but flipped the coin the wrong way. (I myself have often given direction to more junior colleagues working on large legal documents that on such-and-such issue I just want them to make the document internally consistent and I don't care how they do it – but that's ideally on issues where it's an error to think that there's only one right way or best way to do it.)

    2. One classic example of this particular mixup is the Van Morrison song "Cyprus Avenue" which is often mistitled as "Cypress Avenue," presumably a particularly easy confusion because trees are a common/conventional source of street names in the Anglophone world whereas islands in the Mediterranean are not. Apparently whoever named Cyprus Avenue back in Van's hometown of Belfast was a British-Empire enthusiast at a time the Brits had recently taken possession of Cyprus from the Ottomans.

  2. Anthony said,

    November 2, 2017 @ 10:35 pm

    One would expect Mr. Manifold to do this.

  3. Jonathan said,

    November 2, 2017 @ 10:51 pm

    As someone who grew up in Cypress, I am surprised by the amount of international banking going on there, but appreciate its contribution to the local tax base.

  4. Viseguy said,

    November 2, 2017 @ 11:31 pm

    Notably, the Government Memorandum to which Manafort's lawyers are responding gets the spelling right.

  5. Michael Watts said,

    November 2, 2017 @ 11:58 pm

    I myself have often given direction to more junior colleagues working on large legal documents that on such-and-such issue I just want them to make the document internally consistent and I don't care how they do it – but that's ideally on issues where it's an error to think that there's only one right way or best way to do it.

    If it's an error to think there's only one way to do it, why would it matter whether you were internally consistent?

  6. ajay said,

    November 3, 2017 @ 5:13 am

    Is this a pronunciation issue? I'd say the first syllable of Cyprus rhymed with "hype" and the first syllable of "cypress" with "hip".

  7. David Eddyshaw said,

    November 3, 2017 @ 6:34 am

    Spellchecker induced, perhaps?

    I myself, only last month, received a letter from a supposed professional, bearing his handwritten signature, which began:

    Dear Mr Ecdysis,

    One appreciates these personal touches, and I am proud to reclaim my forgotten Hellenic heritage.

  8. richardelguru said,

    November 3, 2017 @ 6:58 am

    You mean he wasn't up a tree?!?

  9. Rodger C said,

    November 3, 2017 @ 7:31 am

    @ajay: I've never heard anyone do that. Are there cypresses where you live? In that case, maybe it's like "contch" v. "conk."

  10. Jerry Friedman said,

    November 3, 2017 @ 9:09 am

    ajay: To follow up on Rodger C's comment, Oxford Dictionaries Online as well as American dictionaries pronounces the first syllable of "cypress" to rhyme with "hype".

  11. RP said,

    November 3, 2017 @ 9:57 am

    @Michael Watts,
    The spellings "recognise" and "recognize" might both be correct in BrE, or in AmE "theatre" and "theater" might both be correct, but eagle-eyed readers might still find it a bit distracting and maybe even a bit unprofessional if they see both spellings in the same document. (What if it was the same page or the same sentence? If you allow variation, where do you draw the line?) Your question seems to amount to the same as asking why publishers have house styles.

  12. J.W. Brewer said,

    November 3, 2017 @ 11:14 am

    What RP said. Alternating randomly between plausible/legitimate alternatives within a single text risks distraction/confusion to the reader, especially if (as is often the case with the sorts of documents I work on professionally) you are likely to have a reader with prescriptivist and/or OCDish tendencies. "House style" is to my mind a more contentious point because variation between different (each internally consistent) books from the same publisher or between different (each internally consistent) articles in the same periodical, especially if bylined and in recognizable individual stylistic voices rather than a generic/institutional voice, is less likely to my mind to cause that sort of distraction/confusion.

  13. KevinM said,

    November 3, 2017 @ 11:40 am

    As lawyers, I'm sure they figured it was close enough ("cy pres").

  14. Rube said,

    November 3, 2017 @ 12:27 pm

    @Kevin M: golf clap.

  15. dainichi said,

    November 3, 2017 @ 10:28 pm

    @KelvinM, you win the thread!

  16. Andrew (not the same one) said,

    November 4, 2017 @ 9:24 am

    If someone were to alternate between 'recognize' and 'recognise', I might wonder if they were trying to signal a difference. (We recently discovered that the difference between 'judgement' and 'judgment' could in some circumstances signal a difference in meaning.)

  17. Jonathan said,

    November 4, 2017 @ 11:19 am

    Okay, I'll bite. What are the circumstances where judgment/judgement yield different meanings?

  18. Andrew (not the same one) said,

    November 4, 2017 @ 3:30 pm

    As I understand it, in official British usage 'judgment' is still used for the judgments of courts, while 'judgement' has effectively replaced it in relation to personal judgement. (At least, 'judgment' is certainly used in court reports: one might argue that this is a dialectal difference between formal and informal English, rather than a difference in meaning, and more evidence would be needed to decide which was right.)

  19. James Wimberley said,

    November 5, 2017 @ 3:37 am

    One or Mr. Manafort's shell companies in Cyprus is called "Black Sea View Ltd." He may be regretting not having followed up the idea.

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