What I call “ambiguity of the part versus the whole”—ambiguity involving whether it’s a single member of a group of two or more that’s being referred to, or the entire group—is annoyingly complicated. Whenever I talk about it, I have to remind myself, and those I’m addressing, that we have no choice but to wrestle with this complexity because people … Read More
I’m blessed with idiot-savant semantic acuity but cursed by a lack of any training in grammar or linguistics. That makes for an awkward combination: I recognize when something is going on in a sentence, then I hit the books and, if necessary, go for help. (See this post about my ambiguity sensei, Rodney Huddleston.) That played out yesterday. I made … Read More
Thanks to Glenn West, I now offer you for your delectation Gwynt Y Môr Ofto Plc v. Gwynt Y Mor Offshore Wind Farm Ltd & Ors [2020] EWHC 850 (Comm) (08 April 2020) (here), a decision of the England and Wales High Court (Commercial Court). It involves scary confusion over verb structures. A contract for sale of a wind-farm off … Read More
I noted with interest this item by Howard Bashman about a program at the 2019 Appellate Judges Education Institute (AJEI) Summit entitled “Thinking Like a Linguist.” As Howard describes it, “the program offered an introduction to the field of linguistics and its past and potential future uses in resolving legal disputes.” But it was actually about a narrower topic—corpus linguistics, … Read More
In this November 2019 post I wrote about Princeton Excess & Surplus Lines Insurance Co. v. Hub City Enterprises, Inc., a court opinion from the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida in which a judge demonstrated catastrophic misunderstanding of how the English language works. In an update to that post earlier this month, I noted that in … Read More
[Updated 1 March 2020: On 4 February 2020 the insurer filed its brief. Go here for a copy. Here’s what they said about this post: With the law and rules of grammar against them, the insureds scour the Internet in search of support for their efforts to transform a stylistic choice into an ambiguity. The insureds settle on a blogger—one … Read More
Thanks to longtime undercover blog informant Steven H. Sholk (drat, I’ve blown his cover!), I’m pleased to bring to you today a recent opinion of the Connecticut federal district court, Tyll v. Stanley Black & Decker Life Insurance Program. It’s discussed in this blog post by the law firm McDermott Will & Emery, but go here for a PDF of … Read More
As I noted in this 2017 post, there’s something compelling about disputes over a comma. A tip from reader Martin Clausen alerted me to another dispute featuring a comma. It’s described in this National Post article about a recent case before the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, Austin v. Bell Canada (PDF here). It involves a dispute over the rate … Read More
I noted with interest an article entitled “Including Without Limitation” (in this issue of The Transactional Lawyer), by Stephen L. Sepinuck of Gonzaga University School of Law. I’ll discuss later in this post the part about including without limitation. But let’s start with what is for me the more interesting part—the last two columns, in particular the following description of … Read More
As someone should have said, The price of freedom from ambiguity is eternal vigilance. Today’s lesson comes to you thanks to the eternally vigilant Glenn D. West, the what-to-say yin to my how-to-say-it yang. He alerted me to the recent opinion of the Delaware Court of Chancery in Batty v. UCAR International, Inc. (PDF here). Here’s the relevant bit (footnotes … Read More
