I groan (inwardly) every time I see or hear the word syllabi at the law school where I teach.

Syllabus has become fully acclimatised and should go the way of normal English plurals: syllabuses.

In the same category is forum. Your Latin teacher (if you had one), would have insisted on the plural fora, of course. Both fora and forums are correct in English (although auto-correct wants to turn fora into for a).

Forums is preferable, and there is judicial authority for this view: see the words of Belobaba J in Leon v Volkswagen AG, 2018 ONSC 4265 at para 40 n 33.

–Neil Guthrie (@guthrieneil)

Some further things to expunge from your professional (and non-professional) vocabulary.

Availability

This is, like functionality, a multisyllabic word that can usefully be replaced by something short and simple – and therefore clear and direct.

Not What’s your availability? A simple Are you free? (or busy or maybe even available) will do fine.

And not I have no availability – just I’m busy.

Piece

People will talk about the employment piece or the environmental piece of a transaction or what-have-you.

Conceptually it’s unobjectionable; it describes a part of a larger whole, an aspect of the bigger picture, an element of something more complex.

It’s just that it’s overused and therefore a bit weary. Couldn’t you try to vary things by referring to the employment issues (or aspects or components or …)?

Synergies

This is just jazzing up the ordinary with pseudo-scientific lingo. Why not just there are opportunities for co-operation (or collaboration), affinities, associations, links …?

Tweak

We don’t seem to revise or edit documents now; invariably we tweak them.

Originally, to tweak someone’s nose was to pull and twist that person’s proboscis. It came to be used figuratively, and at some point (in the 1960s?) it was applied to the making of fine adjustments to a car or other machine.

And from there to legal documents. Not sure how or why; and again, it’s OK in principle but worn-out from use. Find a new metaphor or go back to a plain, non-metaphoric description.

(More recently, to tweak (out) is to become twitchy from using amphetamines or meth. Not to be confused with twerk.)

Value proposition

If piece is overused, this one is done to death. What’s the value proposition?

Instead of this hackneyed phrase, try something simple like What value does it offer? What is it worth? What are you offering? Even What do you bring to the table? is better, though a bit trite.

Anything but the worn-out cliché of the value proposition.

–Neil Guthrie (@guthrieneil)

Burden

In a recent news release, the Ontario Securities Commission said this: ‘Most recently, the OSC announced 107 regulatory changes to reduce burden for market participants while maintaining critical investor protections.’

Good initiative, but the use of burden annoys me. The burden or the regulatory burden would be better: a specific thing, not a general state of affairs. A burden is a discrete load one bears, not the sum of all loads.

The load can be figurative, of course, whether it’s the weight of duty, blame, sin, responsibility, proof or securities regulation.

Stigma

Another word that gets used in the same way is stigma.

This is a borrowing from Greek, meaning the mark of a pointed instrument like a branding iron. The Greek plural stigmata is often used to describe the marks of the nails on the crucified body of Jesus.

In figurative use, a stigma is a mark or brand of disgrace, infamy and the like. We used to talk, for example, of the stigma of illegitimacy.

But stigma is now used as a word to describe the totality of shame-inducing responses to some state of affairs.

The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto uses stigma in grammatically correct ways, but also less well.

This is good: Challenging the stigma associated with mental illness takes understanding, education and a closer look at our own attitudes toward health.

Less so: Take a positive step toward addressing stigma with this online tutorial.

The sentiment is to be applauded; the usage could be better.

Chattel

The legal term chattel is often similarly (mis)used. A chattel is an item of movable personal property, with the plural chattels denoting a collection of such stuff.

Perhaps because of a perceived similarity with the collective cattle (and the two words in fact have a shared etymology), chattel sometimes gets used as a general/collective rather than a specific term: ‘Are we just going to be chattel for commerce?’ (New York Times, 24 January 2020, citing a 1997 Federal Trade Commission hearing).

—

Keep all three of these specific, with definite or indefinite articles attached.

–Neil Guthrie (@guthrieneil)

British Columbia’s Hansard (the transcripts of the Legislative Assembly) was not published until 1970, making researching the intent behind a piece of pre-1970 legislation challenging.

Happily for researchers, the BC Legislative Assembly Sessional Clippings books from 1891 to 1972 are now available through the University of Victoria. These sessional clippings books “include newspaper accounts written by various legislative reporters who covered debates occurring in the British Columbia Legislative Assembly.”

— Susannah Tredwell

As used (or not) in the names of countries.

One does still occasionally hear or see the Ukraine, but be careful not to use that around people of Ukrainian origin. They can get very shirty about it.

Their point is that the definite article the makes the country sound more like a region, like the Midwest or the Highlands – and, by implication, a sub-division of some larger entity.

And we all know which larger entity most Ukrainians are not longing to be part of again…

This is all fair enough, geopolitically speaking, but perhaps not linguistically.

First, Ukrainian (like other Slavic languages) uses no articles at all (no a, an or the), so perhaps can’t really dictate when English uses them.

Secondly, there are countries that do take an article as part of their names.

The definite article is part of the official names of The Gambia and The Bahamas.

The definite article is often – even usually – used with a range of other nations, as a matter of idiom. Many are archipelagos or include a form of government as part of the name, but not all: Central African Republic, Channel Islands, Comoros, Congo, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, Lebanon (especially for those who know their Human League back catalogue), Maldives, Marshall Islands, Netherlands, Philippines, Seychelles, Solomon Islands, Sudan, United Kingdom, United States of America, Yemen.

(The) Congo and The Gambia each takes its name from the river that runs through it.

But, if you’re likely to be read or heard by Ukrainians, the country is just Ukraine.

The Dominican is also likely to irritate Dominicans, for whom it is always the Dominican Republic (or sometimes even the historical Santo Domingo).

–Neil Guthrie (@guthrieneil)

This was the headline of a recent LinkedIn post: Cryptocurrency do’s, don’ts and dangers. Think before you use the apostrophe and you’ll do it correctly: Dos, don’ts and dangers. At least it wasn’t danger’s in the original.

And, without catastrophic apostrophes, it is No ifs, ands or buts.

The possessive forms of women, children and men also seems to cause problems, because they take ‘s (which is more usually attached to a singular noun, not a plural one). As a result, women’s hockey, children’s toys and men’s room.

The compounds menswear, womenswear and childrenswear are rather ugly compressed versions of two-word forms with proper apostrophes (men’s wear etc.), but a trip to a local department store will probably confirm that one-word, apostrophe-less compounds have become the norm. (Although on the computer screen, only menswear appears without a squiggly red line of warning under it.)

It was (almost) certainly a one-off, or at least an idiosyncratic error, but I’ve encountered ‘though. No: it’s though or although.

–Neil Guthrie (@guthrieneil)

Not of books, but of dignitaries.

Judges

Stephen Waddams observes in Introduction to the Study of Law (my edition is 1992) that it is not proper to refer to a judge as Your Honour (or My Lord/Lady, where that is still used) outside the courtroom. He advocates just plain Mr Wagner or Ms Karakatsanis, or failing that the old-fashioned Judge (without the person’s surname) when you encounter one in a social setting. Most Canadian lawyers will probably say Justice So-and-so at a cocktail party, if they are not on first-name terms, and this also has the sanction of historical usage.

As pointed out previously, it’s Madam [emphasis on the first syllable] Justice not Madame Justice. In England, it’s Mrs (or less commonly Ms, occasionally Miss) Justice for female High Court judges. (Canada did a better job of capturing the dignity of the bench with Madam…) In the Court of Appeal for England and Wales, it is Lord or Lady Justice Who’s-it; in the UK Supreme Court, Lord or Baroness [or Lady, depending on preference] What’s-it.

Retired judges in Canada and England are often still referred to by their former judicial titles, as a courtesy, but it is not wrong to call the former Justice Binnie just plain Mr Binnie now that he is back in private practice. Beverley McLachlin, though retired from the Supreme Court of Canada, is still Justice McLachlin (although not Chief Justice) because she now sits on Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal. And an envelope addressed to her would not have Ms Beverley McLachlin on it; she is The Rt Hon Beverley McLachlin – and in writing Mr Binnie gets The Hon Ian Binnie.

Government officials

Ministers of the Crown are now referred to as Minister Freeland or Minister Elliott— and, mutatis mutandis, so are mayors, police chiefs, dog-catchers, what have you. This is an unfortunate American habit. In the good old days in our loved Dominion, the Minister of Whatever was simply called Minister to her or his face and referred to as Mr, Ms etc., as the case might be. Somewhere along the way (and I think it was in the 1980s), we began imitating the US convention of calling officials in the executive branch Secretary Baker and Assistant Under-Secretary Butcher.

Another weird thing (among many) that Americans do is to keep calling former office-holders by the title they used to hold. In Canada and the UK, a former prime minister goes back to private life and relinquishes all the trappings of office, including the title (although, in the UK, he or she might get a peerage or knighthood, like Baroness Thatcher or Sir John Major). It’s Ms Kim Campbell and Mr David Cameron (although both are, more formally, The Rt Hon). Whereas south of the 49th parallel, President Carter, President Bush (times two), President Clinton and President Obama are still kicking around. As well as that orange person.

And while we’re on the subject, Amurricans still say Mr President, Ms Secretary, etc. We dropped the M-preamble long ago: it’s just How do you do, Prime Minister? when you meet our head of government, not Mr or Ms Prime Minister.

Royalty

The person represented on the coinage isn’t Queen Elizabeth: that was her mother, Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother. It is simply The Queen or Her Majesty on your quarter.

Prince Charles is what we call the heir to the Canadian throne colloquially, but he is properly The Prince of Wales (in Scotland, though, he is The Duke of Rothesay and Lord of the Isles). His first wife was never (correctly) Princess Diana; she started her married life as The Princess of Wales and, after her divorce, became Diana, Princess of Wales. Wife number two is not Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, which would imply she is a widow or a divorcée. Just The Duchess of Cornwall; same deal with her step-daughters-in-law.

If their husbands had not been created royal dukes, Kate and Meghan would be respectively Princess William of Wales and Princess Harry of Wales. If that sounds odd, think of the old-fashioned way of addressing a married lady: Mrs John Smith (and of Princess Michael of Kent, whose first name is Marie-Christine). In any event, never Princess (or Duchess) Kate or Princess (or Duchess) Meghan, even though they are both princesses (and duchesses) by virtue of marriage.

Note, by the way, those official upper-case Ts in the titles of senior royals. And you should stick HRH before the title of a prince or princess, HM for the Boss.

–Neil Guthrie (@guthrieneil)

My apologies to readers: this search tip is very BC-specific!

Quickscribe has recently added a useful new feature that allows you to set up an alert to notify you when a specific word or phrase is used in a bill, an order, or Hansard in British Columbia. For example, you could set up an alert to see any Orders that refer to the University Act or an alert to see any references in Hansard to the B.C. Utilities Commission.

To set up an alert, you will need to have access to Quickscribe and have set up a Personal Login. Once you’re logged in, go to My Alerts, then Keyword Alerts, and follow the instructions.

— Susannah Tredwell

Canadiana Online’s unparalleled online collection of historical materials is now free to access. The collection, available at no charge at Canadiana.ca, contains more than 60 million digitized pages of books, periodicals, and government publications from early Canadian history. 

Why should lawyers and legal researchers take note of this thrilling development? Canadiana Online features an outstanding collection of historical statutes, bills, legal journals, and law reports. Some examples include:   

• Bills
• Court Rules
• Criminal Law Texts
• Law Reports
• Lawyer Directories
• Sessional Papers
• Statutes

Legal researchers should take advantage of the wealth of legal resources available freely online here.  Canadian Online offers a simple search interface with search tips. Search results can be narrowed by multiple search filters and subject headings.       

Sources Cited

Ross, R. (2018, November 15). Over 60 Million Pages of Digitized Canadian Documentary Heritage Soon To Be Available At No Charge. Retrieved from: https://www.crkn-rcdr.ca/en/over-60-million-pages-digitized-canadian-documentary-heritage-soon-be-available-no-charge  

[This tip by Alan Kilpatrick originally appeared on the Law Society of Saskatchewan Library’s Legal Sourcery Blog.]

Grumpy Baby-boomers will oft have cause to make exclamations like this (but they may phrase it in less polite language). Or they may have no cause at all, but exclaim anyway.

One thing that is sure to raise the ire of older professionals is casual language in e-mails.

On this point, the Boomers are not wrong: and certainly the very casual style of the text message has no place in professional correspondence, even when it’s digital. Srsly.

That said, at least two of the abbreviations beloved of texting millennials have an older provenance than you might imagine.

IDK, short for ‘I don’t know’, turns out to be US military slang from the First World War. The News Courier of Athens, Alabama reported on 17 August 1918 that IDK was ‘the latest American soldier slang … which stands for “I don’t know” in reply to fool questions asked by recruits and men who have just been landed.’ Or perhaps by partners in law firms.

OMG (‘Oh, my God/gosh!’) is of roughly the same vintage, having been used by Admiral Lord Fisher in a letter to Winston Churchill (then Minister of Munitions) on 9 September 1917. While the admiral explained that it stood for ‘Oh! My God!’, he was using it as a short form for a fanciful new order of knighthood, jokingly modelled on the existing Order of St Michael and St George (the grades of which are abbreviated CMG, KCMG and GCMG). So, not quite how the kids are using it now.

Even if IDK and OMG pre-date the Boomers by a long way, you still shouldn’t use them (or WTF, LMAO, LOL and the like) in your business e-mail.

–Neil Guthrie (@guthrieneil)

• Nicholas on Software Tools for Editing
• Jamie on Software Tools for Editing
• Steve Coughlan on ‘I Hope This E-Mail Finds You Well’
• Lyn on Womxn
• Celia Chandler on Gross Negligence

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