At last week’s seminar in Sydney, one of the participants asked me about the phrase however so described. I told her that I’d look into it; she probably didn’t expect that it would lead me to another way to handle redundancy. Redundancy has two sources. There’s what I’ll call rhetorical redundancy: when you throw in synonyms or near synonyms just … Read More
Consider the following (emphasis added): This agreement is personal to the Employee. The Employee shall not assign any of the Employee’s rights or delegate any of the Employee’s obligations under this agreement to any other person, except that the Employee may assign the Employee’s rights under this agreement to the Employee’s personal or legal representatives, executors, administrators, heirs, distributees, devisees … Read More
I was surprised to have my publisher point out to me that although in the manuscript for the third edition of MSCD I had cited the fifteenth edition, the sixteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style has been with us since 2010. So I immediately bought a copy and updated my CMoS references. It’s no mystery why I should … Read More
The reader who goes by the name A. Wright Burke, M. Phil., told me about this article by Edmund H. Mahoney in the Hartford Courant. It describes how in Pac. Employers Ins. Co. v. Travelers Cas. & Sur. Co., 3:11CV924 MRK, 2012 WL 3202934 (D. Conn. Aug. 3, 2012) (PDF copy here), the judge describes as “gibberish” the insurance-policy provision at issue … Read More
Some readers may have noticed that in this post discussing problematic terms of art I don’t use the phrase “magic words.” I’ve long used “magic words” as a label for dysfunctional terminology; see this 2010 blog post. But while writing my post on terms of art, I realized that although “magic words” has real snark value, it’s otherwise unhelpful. So … Read More
[This post replaces this previous post, which I deleted, except for the comments. Very occasionally I write something, post it, and then promptly realize that the topic in question is more complex than I had bargained for. That happened with my previous post. I revised it once, but realized that wouldn’t do the trick, and revising it again seemed a … Read More
[I’ve deleted this post because it has been supplanted by this post. Sorry for the discombobulation!]
A recent opinion by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals serves as yet another reminder that the job description of anyone drafting a contract includes guarding against overreaching by a court. The case in question is Flagship Credit Corp. v. Indian Harbor Ins. Co., 2012 WL 2299484 (5th Cir. June 15, 2012) (copy here). A finance company that was sued in a … Read More
