Posted: Thursday 12 January 2012
Bad English
By Austin Flynn
I happened to see most of the match last night between Manchester City and Liverpool so I already knew that Liverpool won 1-0 thanks to a Steven Gerrard penalty. However, if I hadn’t known the score, the caption under the headline picture on today’s BBC Sport website wouldn’t have helped me. It said:
“Manchester City boss Roberto Mancini is involved in an angry tunnel exchange with Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard after his side's 1-0 Carling Cup semi-final first leg defeat.”
Does the “his” in “his side’s” refer to Steven Gerrard's side or Robert Mancini’s side? It’s not clear and the sentence is badly drafted. Try replacing “his side’s” with “Manchester City’s” and all of a sudden it’s as clear as day.
It’s a relatively trivial point, but it’s just an example of why sloppy drafting can make any statement unhelpful. In the case of badly drafted legal documents it can sometimes even be an expensive liability.
Given that giant pandas are all the rage in Edinburgh at the moment, the question of bad English also allows me a smooth segue into the now famous book on grammar, and in particular punctuation, published in 2003: “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation”. For any of you who don’t know, the name of the book comes from the following joke on bad punctuation:
A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other diners.
'Why?' asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
'Well, I'm a panda,' he says, at the door. 'Look it up.'
The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. 'Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.'
That book led to a whole raft of comment in the media on whether language should evolve, whether rules of grammar and punctuation are written in tablets of stone and even whether we should just begin to ignore grammar and punctuation altogether. I have to say that I tend towards the purist end of the spectrum but I do accept that language changes, always has done and always will do. That’s just a fact. However, the evolution of language shouldn’t be used as an excuse for people to stop communicating properly and with clarity.
Take the following sentence: “The judge said the defendant is a crook.” What does it mean? Without any punctuation it could mean any one of a number of things, so try adding some punctuation:
- “The judge” said the defendant “is a crook.”
- The judge said “the defendant is a crook.”
The question of who is the crook is a bit like the question of who won last night’s Carling Cup semi-final first leg.
As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog, my clients buy protection, peace of mind, problem-solving and certainty/clarity in their business dealings. Quite simply if I can’t write properly I can’t do my job properly so it matters greatly who won the football, whether the defendant (or the judge) is a crook and what pandas do in cafés. Make sure your lawyer knows these things too.
2 Comments
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John replied on 13 Jan 2012 at 07:36
Pedants unite!! I completely agree Austin - there is a time and place for what we all used to call the Queen's English, and legal documentation is one such time and place. However, I am also firmly in the plain English camp, and am happy to see a steady move away from over reliance on legalese in legal documents towards a world where the document says what it needs to with a minimum of fuss.
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Mike replied on 13 Jan 2012 at 12:55
And of course in Scotland - it's accused or defender. Not defendant.
