Humor – Robert A. Fortuno, P.C.

The lawyer’s lament

[There is no] lawyer’s Paradise where all words have a fixed, precisely ascertained meaning…

—James Bradley Thayer (1898)

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

—T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton (1936)

Thayer reminds me of the Coolio song, Gangsta’s Paradise: “Been spendin’ most their lives / Livin’ in the gangsta’s paradise…” The first words of the Thayer quote, which are usually paraphrased away, reinforce my mental connection: “The Chief Justice here retires into that lawyer’s Paradise…”

Order vs. chaos

tiny-ship-2020

It has always been this way, and it always will be. Though we usually manage to ignore the chaos or repress awareness of it … these days, not so much.

Heard on the radio today

“De-risking” the stock market, a euphemism for “panic selling.”
A fast-talking ad for “secure flip units.” In this case, “secure” really means “speculative,” and “secure” plus “flip” makes for a nice oxymoron as well.

Negativity

Caption from a cartoon on legal drafting: “Never use one double negative where no triple negative will not prove unnecessary.”

One of the banes of legalese.

Books are like tweets

Books are like tweets, except longer.

Author John Green on Twitter.