Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond
Time for a new will, I thought, remembering Dr Johnson’s observation that ‘when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully’.
I don’t know the actual date of my departure, and I hope it’s more than a fortnight away, but the odds have plainly shortened. Yet it wasn’t entirely the doctor’s comment that had prompted me. I’d asked my solicitor to dust off the most recent effort, made in 1990, about six months ago. One glance at the new draft was enough to make me drop it like a soggy swab: it was largely unintelligible.
Here I must at once absolve my lawyer of any responsibility for the 20 pages of gibberish he laid before me.
A document written in simple English, he explained, was likely to lead to a nightmarish contestation that would make Jarndyce v Jarndyce look like a momentary disagreement between a honeymoon couple over who should sleep on which side of the bed.
A will has to be in legalese, it seems. Clarity is everything; never mind that clarity for lawyers is quite different from clarity for anyone else. Every imaginable ambiguity must be identified and eliminated. Every simple word must be replaced by several much longer words.
Plain English must yield to archaic pomposity. Every sentence must contain a string of clauses and every clause a string of sub-clauses. The only feature of conventional prose that is restrained is punctuation: the entire document contains no comma, no colon and no full stop. Every sentence is a paragraph unto itself, with its very own number.
One sentence has 171 words. Some of the words seem to have as many letters. ‘Hereinafter’ and ‘hereinbefore’ jostle with ‘thereto’ and ‘thenceforward’. ‘Any such appointment … shall take effect according to its tenor,’ the will asserts. The executors can borrow money ‘for keeping on foot or restoring same’ – an insurance policy, apparently.
Of course, no one reads this stuff, which these days is spewed out of a computer. I spotted a misspelling that had been overlooked, I was told, by hundreds of beady testamentary eyes. No wonder. If you can’t understand it when it’s spelt right, who cares if it’s spelt wrong?
Things may be worse in Scotland. A Scottish document I had to sign recently was full of words such as ‘effeiring’, ‘disponed’, ‘pertinent’ (as a noun), ‘sasine’ (aka ‘infeftment’) and ‘warrandice’. I had to look them all up in a dictionary.
Why is this state of affairs tolerated? Some might blame a thousand years of legal history and a corpus of statutes, cases and so on written in ye olde Englishe and sprinkled with Latin. Some might say every activity has its jargon, and even something as simple as tennis uses words such as ‘service’, ‘let’ and ‘deuce’ to meet its particular ends. Others might point to the copious flow of poorly drafted legislation nowadays. And so on.
Piffle. England’s 1689 Bill of Rights is easy to understand. So is America’s 1787 Constitution. True, jargon is often useful, but that’s no excuse for using an all-butsecret language to define laws every citizen is expected to know. As for bad legislation, it should be improved; not used to justify tosh.
Other countries manage fine with plain English. In March, a judge in Saskatchewan declared valid a will scribbled on a Mcdonald’s napkin by a man who thought he was having a heart attack. Another Canadian scratched a valid will on the tractor beneath which he lay dying.
I suppose I should have just bought a DIY form from W H Smith. But although it would have been cheaper, I don’t think it would have done much to banish legalese. Opaque verbosity is the lifeblood of an entrenched profession of jurists.