Every time I see the silly phrase “Know all men by these presents,” I think of Christmas. Perhaps a statement the Magi wanted to make about their presents for the Christ child. Nevertheless, I’m no expert on drafting contracts: on that subject, I defer to Ken Adams, who riffs on the silly phrase in this post.
Can I get a witnesseth?
How did “Nimrod,” the name of a biblical character, become an insult? Blame Bugs Bunny. As Mark Nichol explains at Daily Writing Tips:
In a Looney Tunes cartoon featuring Bugs’s fumbling nemesis Elmer Fudd as a hunter on the rabbit’s trail, the carrot-chomping coney sardonically refers to Fudd as a nimrod — insulting him by derisively comparing him to a biblical personage renowned for his hunting skills. Apparently, later generations of Looney Tunes fans who hadn’t kept up with their Scripture picked up on Bugs’s attitude without understanding the ironic allusion, and the word acquired a new meaning, while its original sense faded into the background.
Legal writers often confuse decedent with descendant. So let’s get these two almost-homonyms straight. The decedent is dead. The decedent’s surviving progeny are descendants. A good way to keep these words straight is to remember that descendant is related to the verb descend.
When should passive voice be used? George Gopen can think of five instances. (Hat tip to Stephanie West Allen.)
If you’re not, someone like Judge Posner may slam you in full color.
West’s headnote of the day:
In the statement of the issues on appeal, every ground of appeal ought to be so distinctly stated that the reviewing court may at once see the point which it is called upon to decide without having to “grope in the dark” to ascertain the precise point at issue.
Jones v. Lott, 692 S.E.2d 900 (S.C. 2010).
I regularly read Thy Will Be Done for spiritual inspiration. Today that wonderful blog also provided a little writing lesson. Today’s post included this sentence:
We might accept the Savior as the one who helps, but we’re afraid to mention his name and remain silent.
That last clause, “remain silent,” is ambiguous, or at least can cause a miscue. Does it mean that we remain silent, or that we’re afraid to remain silent? From the context, we can figure out that the former is what the writer means. But for expository prose, a sentence that can be figured out isn’t as good as a sentence that doesn’t need figuring out. To eliminate the need to figure out this sentence, we need to add only one word and one punctuation mark:
We might accept the Savior as the one who helps, but we’re afraid to mention his name, and we remain silent.
Notice what we’re doing here. We use parallel structure to put “remain silent” on the same level as “are afraid.”
Every now and then, I’ll make a boo-boo on this blog. Gentle readers have let me know, for example, when I’ve confused its with it’s, or then with than. Stuff like that happens when you work without an editor, as every blogger does. John McIntyre explains why slips like that happen and how to keep them in proper perspective. So if you spot a slip like that on this blog, please do point it out in a comment or an e-mail, and I’ll fix it with gratitude and without taking offense.
The other day I wrote this blog post about starting a sentence with “so.” That post was prompted by a Facebook posting by Stephanie West Allen, who now has followed up with her own interesting blog post on the same subject. Stephanie’s post features a link to a New York Times article and some thoughts on the subject by George Gopen.
Of course any good thing can be overdone. If you’re starting every other sentence with “so,” you may need to question your usage of it and impose a self-discipline of avoiding “so” as a sentence starter. But I hope this awareness doesn’t evolve into a superstition against this usage, like those against starting a sentence with a conjunction or ending it with a preposition. Around here, our official position remains that any word, no matter its part of speech, can be the first (or last) word in a sentence. “So,” as a conjunction or an adverb, can be the first word in a sentence. Just don’t overdo it.
Of course it’s okay. I’ll take it a step further: no part of speech is disqualified as the first word of a sentence. For instance:
Noun: John kicked the ball.
Verb: Get ready.
Adjective: Dark clouds formed.
Adverb: Merrily we rolled along.
Preposition: Of course it’s okay. (It’s also okay to end a sentence with a preposition, but that’s a topic for another post.
Conjunction: And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field,
keeping watch over their flock by night. (Luke 2:8, King James Version)
Oh, and you can start a sentence with an interjection too.