More from the "Say what?" department

While browsing the clearance aisle at Half-Price Books, I stumbled across "The Party of the First Part," a humorous look at legal language and its development across the ages.

Now that I work for a lawyer, I thought I should study up a bit, and when a book's on clearance at Half-Price Books, you're paying a pittance for what could turn out to be a gold mine.

The author, who is a lawyer, is a bit too give to bad puns, but I did learn quite a bit that helped me to understand some of the arcane phrases I run across in the documents I look at day after day.

Much of legalese, according to the writer, comes about from the use of boilerplate -- prewritten material that has passed the test of time and can be safely used again and again. Objections from those of us who have to read it and would like to have it put in plain English will be told that all the verbiage is necessary to make sure all the contingencies are covered. That the language is necessary to ensure precision.

I've run into similar situations. While working as communication director for one organization, I had to review and edit our various manuals. The organization heads were OK with my changing just about every change I wanted to make until it came to the employee handbook.

That language had been carefully reviewed by the lawyers, and everyone would be better off if I didn't try my hand at simplifying it.

So, you would have phrases like Failure on the part of the employee to perform the duties as prescribed and/or directed by a supervisor could result in disciplinary action and/or termination.

You can almost always tell a lawyer has worked on a document if "and/or" shows up.

What that long sentence translates to is: If you don't do your job the way you're told to, you're in trouble and could be fired.

I realize that my version doesn't include a reference to discipline but that could be dealt with fairly simply as well.

The real killer in this is that lawyers will defend long, impossible sentences on the theory that the legal jargon constitutes a kind of legal shorthand that would result in even longer documents if it weren't used.

A lawyer responsible for writing the small print that accompanies credit applications made this point in an interview I heard recently on the subject. She pointed to the word "herein" as an example. If she had to say "in this document," she'd be using three words instead of one, she said, and where's the economy in that?

Of course that totally ignores the padding of words in the rest of the document.

Take this example I ran across last week.

"Grantor does expressly reserve unto himself/herself/theirselves, his/her/their heirs and assigns, all minerals of which the Grantor is possessed (including but not by way of limitation oil, gas, sulfur, coal, lignite and uranium) in, under and that may be produced from the land herein conveyed, including all royalties, bonus and delay rentals due and payable under any applicable oil, gas and mineral lease covering said land, provided, however, Grantor agrees he/she/they will not use or occupy any portion of the surface of the property ..."

The rest of the sentence takes up an equal amount of space. Yes, that's right. That sentence is twice as long therein.

The essence of the portion quoted is, of course: I'm selling you this property but I'm keeping the rights to all the minerals and any income they might produce.

Even if you successfully argue that all the contingencies have to be included so some other clever lawyer can't find a way to sneak some of your rights away from you, the sentence could at least be broken into simpler chunks.

And perhaps the worst problem is that after using the himself/herself/theirselves, which should have been "themselves," way of avoiding sexism or whatever problem that wording avoids, the document includes this standard language that appears in pretty much every deed I've seen:

"When this Deed is executed by more than one person, or when the Grantee is more than one person, the instrument shall read as though pertinent verbs, nouns and pronouns were changed correspondingly, and ..." (I really won't subject you to the rest of that sentence, which is also twice as long as I've quoted.)

What that standard does is say, hey, I'm going to use singular and masculine throughout this document, and you should make the appropriate substitutions when you read it because it's simpler that way.

Only in this case, it's not simpler.

And don't be fooled; even though you make be tempted to take up an instrument and execute the writer of this, um, what to call it, hmm, let's just say "stuff," that's not what those words mean therein -- I think I'm beginning to like that term.

This, folks, is probably not the meaning of the proverb, "The pen is mightier than the sword." Unless you're trying to sign the swordsman to a waiver of liability, in which case he'll probably decide it's not worth the trouble to read all the words and walks off in disgust.