I have been teaching law this year, and I make my students (a) learn the Latin and Law French expressions that lawyers and pretentous jurists use and (b) translate them into plain English so they know they really understand them. "So what does respondeat superior mean in words of less than one syllable?" I told them that the law is loaded with that sort of stuff partly because of the long history of the common law, which used to be carried out in Latin and Law French, but mainly because it makes lawyers seem like they are really smart to use expressions in languages they don't understand. (After four years of college I got a diploma in a language I could barely recall bits of from my Catholic school years. . . .) Fodor's a total fraud about this, I don't believe he knows Latin at all.
--- ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> wrote:
> At around 16/12/06 6:51 am, joanna wrote:
> >
> > (But, in my dissertation I did translate all my
> latin and greek
> > quotes....as should everyone who doesn't have a
> giant stick up their
> > butts.)
> >
>
> Indeed. Forget quoting Latin or Greek... it's worse:
> the peppering of
> phrases within sentences, for which English
> equivalents (of roughly
> similar length) are available. I am struggling
> through a small book by
> Jerry Fodor right now and have to keep Googling for
> Latin phrases every
> half page ;-). I would give most such use the
> benefit of the doubt, but
> my suspicion arises from similar usage of language
> with which I am more
> familiar (not less): uses of words and phrases of
> Sanskrit or Indian
> origin in the West, many of which are both
> gratuitous and at best
> off-base. Of course language can be used as a device
> without resort to
> exotica, as Carrol demonstrates with "clarity
> fetishists"!!! (I am
> equally unhappy with opposing labels such as
> "obscurantist" which only
> begs the question).
>
> --ravi
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