Sacrificing factual fidelity for flow

[Jonathan Lighter]

Benjamin Barrett wrote that, not me.

  And kudos for "essense"  It out-Joyces Joyce.

  JL

Doug Harris <cats22 at FRONTIERNET.NET> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Doug Harris
Subject: Re: Sacrificing factual fidelity for flow
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Earlier today, JL wrote:

(I have seen this sort of thing in real estate documents as well as other
legal contexts. In my recent house purchase, I had to ask my agent about an
item, and he just told me that the common practice reading was X and so I
was okay.)
-----------
A real estate agent (or realAtor, as folk around here are
wont to say) saying you are OK (or okay) doesn't make it
so.
And a lawyer's interpretation of a real estate contract's
language can drive you to ...protest LOUDLY, sometimes to
the point of yelling and screaming and carrying on like a
wild person.
Particularly if you are a seller expecting to close (or
settle) on your soon-to-be-ex-home on a given date, and
the buyer isn't prepared to close then, but the lawyer
says "oh, that's OK, common practice is that they have
thirty days _or so_ after the contract date to close...
and there's nothing you can do about it.
Been there; suffered that.
---
Oh, and on the synthesizer point, in the context for which the text was
written,
one must keep in mind that [A] the _simple_ essense of a news item is the
issue,
and [B] anyway, the liklihood that a news-crawl reader will nit-pick the
issue is
about as one-onehundred-and-twentyninethousandth* as small, relative to the
number
of people exposed to the message, as the number who will pay the slightest
bit of
attention to it. (*Rounded down to the nearest million.)
(the other) doug

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