drunk and disorderly

[Charles C Doyle]

Just heard on a "Law and Order" rerun--and realized that I hear it frequently on "legal" shows:

Prosecutor speaking at a preliminary hearing:  "Your honor, we request remand."

--Charlie

________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Joel S. Berson [Berson at ATT.NET]
Sent: Tuesday, June 28, 2011 3:12 PM


The original challenge, from Charles Doyle. was with respect to this
as a noun phrase:

>I'm wondering, though, whether legal parlance has a distinctive
>tendency to nominalize words, whether by clipping or plain function
>shift.  In Georgia, at least, there is a crime named "drunk and
>disorderly" (not "drunkenness and disorder"):  "He was charged with
>drunk and disorderly last night."

George's examples below seem all to be adjectival phrases.  That is
much older.  As I wrote yesterday, "In the OED, I find quotations
from 1340, 1489, and 1585 (as well as 1830), but all as an adjectival phrase."

Joel


At 6/28/2011 11:34 AM, George Thompson wrote:
>My father used to speak of someone being arrested for "drunk and disorderly"
>-- indeed, he might have had the experience himself, in his youth in
>Brooklyn, in the 1910s & 1920s.
>
>I dare say that it is cop-talk: Your honor, I saw him coming down the
>street, and he was drunk, and disorderly.
>
>Searching a dozen or so of the Proquest files available to me, I see that
>there are a number of appearances in the mid & late 1820s of phrases like
>"he was arrested for being drunk and disorderly in the streets", all either
>from English sources, or from an American source that is quoting an English
>source.  The first home-grown appearance I notice is:
>. . . Jerry Duggin, an old acquaintance, being placed at the bar before
>Alderman Thorp as drunk and disorderly, Jerry, before the evidence could be
>given against him [began bantering with the Judge].
>
>*Atkinson's Saturday Evening Post (1831-1839); *Oct 22, 1831; Vol. X., Whole
>No. 534.;
>
>American Periodicals Series Online
>
>
>There's no indication that this story is copied from another paper, but
>looking it over, I'm a bit suspicious: there's a reference to "the officers
>of the New Police", which sounds like an allusion to the Peelers, and Jerry
>addresses the Judge as your Honor, but also as your Worship.  Your Honor was
>the usual mode in NYC courts at this time, but I don't think I've
>encountered "your Worship".  But maybe that was the usage in Philly.
>
>In any event, I'm suspicious that this is copied from an English
>publication, which either was uncredited, or the acknowledgement has been
>cut out of the on-line version.

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