Having often wondered ourselves how specialised jargon in general was some sort of professional wizardry (tech, medicine, economics, the 
clergy) to make their practise impenetrable or inscrutable for non-experts, via Language Hat, we enjoyed this study that postulates that the embedded, dependent clause-rich sentence structure of legalese—forgoing even the spellbinding elements of legal Latin—is like a magical incantation. This obfuscation by design, parsing thousands of court documents, holds despite even lawyers decrying and disavowing this style and repeated calls for “plain language” laws (decisions don’t have a specific requirement for florid and what’s perceived to be “exacting” and only precedent and simpler worded ones are equally enforceable on appeal) and seem to have a performative aspect—a capacity for proscription rather than just description—that lends a sense of a magic formula above the ken of outsiders. More from The Conversation at the link above.
synchronoptica
one year ago: the debut of Star Trek: The Animated Series (with synchronoptica)
seven years ago: newspapers in movies, Hurricane Irma’s path of destruction, Saturn’s rings, London’s Garden Museum, an illustrated ship’s log plus Ford pardons Nixon
eight years ago: a patriotic art counterfeiter, assorted links worth revisiting, more spirit drawings plus New Amsterdam becomes New York
nine years ago: the curious names of US court justices
ten years ago: Scotland’s independence referendum
