LL-L "Style" 2008.04.08 (02) [E]

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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Translation" 2008.04.07 (08) [A/E]

> From: Maria Elsie Zinsser <ezinsser at icon.co.za>
> Subject: LL-L "Translation" 2008.04.07 (06) [E]
>
> Hi all, especially Mark, Mark & Vlad,
>
> I believe legal jargon is like any other jargon, i.e. a means by which
> to control knowledge and ultimately economic position.

I don't know if that can be all there is to it, though.

As a software engineer I often have to work with requirements from
customers, sometimes thousands of requirements, which the customers
believe they have worded precisely. Yet they're often like:

"When maximised it will be possible to restore the window to its
original position with a single mouseclick."

And then I'm thinking, "Well, I see what they mean, windowing systems
generally do behave that way." So I make things work as standard, and
then imagine my surprise when they say they really did mean the original
position, ie, where it was when it was first opened! So I say that's
very unusual but they're adamant. So after some unconventional
programming I give them what they want and when they see it they say,
"Hmmm... that doesn't look right, I think Jen must have meant what you
said in the first place..." and so on!

I guess after a few hundred years software specification will have
sorted out a less ambiguous form of English for its own purposes, but
that will be harder for the "layman" to understand or even see the point
of.

I'm not saying that there aren't plenty of lawyers who are happy to use
this to obfuscate, but when I've heard lawyers talking business it does
seem to me that they're comfortable with terms that mean nothing to me
but signify crucial distinctions to them.

As for "any other jargon" being a means to control, etc, it's not that
you can get somewhere in computers by knowing the jargon, it's that you
can't even talk about a lot of things at all without the jargon. Is it
going to make things easier to say "the interpreter that you type
commands into when you're running that operating system that runs on big
unaffordable computers mainly" instead of "the bash shell"? I couldn't
even think of an alternative way of saying "operating system" in my
"plain English" version!

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/

•

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