Write well, spell correctly, lawyer urges

Lawyers are often criticized for arcane and convoluted language. Not Andrew Berry (left), chairman of McCarter & English in Newark, N.J. He's interviewed in The Wall Street Journal Law Blog about the importance of clear writing and avoiding typographical errors. Says he:

“Do not ever for the second time give your senior (lawyer) a piece of writing with a typo or a grammatical mistake.”

Such errors, he says, derail the lawyer's stock in trade: A smooth train of thought.
In addition, Berry urges young lawyers to read Antonin Scalia's new book on advocacy, especially the parts about the importance of writing well.
The dynamics of today's communications (IM, email, Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, text-messaging) augur against this, but Berry and the rest of us can dream, can't we??

Word of the Day: Guerdon

n. A reward, recompense or requital. (As a verb, to reward).

The word has several Middle English derivations, all of which probably come from the Latin donum, or gift, according to Webster's Unabridged.
You're probably wondering why guerdon shouldn't have a more martial meaning, with similar words like guerilla. That's because those ME derivations include a variation of widar, to give back.
Guerdon is what Sameer Mishra (left) spelled to win the 2008 Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington last Friday. For winning, his guerdon includes $35,000 and a $2,500 savings bond. Not bad for getting your letters right.

Bad grammar "Eccos" relentlessly

Ecco makes pretty good shoes. Their ad agencies writes pretty painful ad copy.
From the recent "My World My Style" print and online campaign:

"I will spend the entire day just walking on my feet. So for my shoes, comfort and styles have to go hand and hand. My Ecco is Yucatan."

Do advertising agencies no longer employ copy editors? Does the "feel" of the copy outweigh the value of the words that produces it?
"I will spend the entire day just walking on my feet"...???? As opposed to.... your hands?? That would be quite a feat!
And less obvious but still grating: "comfort and styles have to go hand and hand." I get it, but when the product is shoes, isn't there a better simile??

Word of the Day

Tergiversate: (v) to change repeatedly one's attitudes or opinions.
From the Latin tergiversatus, to turn one's back.

I haven't come across that word ever, and it's a beauty. Found it Joe Queenan's Wall Street Journal op-ed today on, who else? Hillary Clinton. Fits like a glove.

Say what you mean

Writing functions both as a spotlight and as a shield. It you want it to function as the former, it's important to strip out all ambiguity from your sentences, otherwise it's simply a waste of everyone's time.
Take Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's less-than-encouraging quotation this week about the financial markets:

"I do believe that the worst is likely to be behind us."

That came from a Wall Street Journal story, headlined: "Paulson Sees Financial Turmoil Abating." His quotation, however, says nothing of the sort. It's "likely." His quote says, to me, "maybe we're coming out of it; maybe not."
If he really means to say the financial turmoil is easing, he'd have said: "The worst is behind us."
It's unsettling--when so many of us are unsettled that we haven't hit bottom--that the secretary of the treasury is unsure.

Jury rig

There's nothing like the wide-open spaces in the mountains to give one a chance to improvise when needed. I spent this weekend with (left to right) my buddy, Pat, my son, Malcolm, and my brother, Kirk, fixing a major problem near our cabin in the Coast Range. You can see a newly graded road running across the creek and out of the picture. That's on our absentee neighbor's property, up the creek from our place. That road hasn't been graded--or used much--since the 1970s, and the creek's comings and goings over the succeeding decades has made the creek ford impossible. It's not an important road, so no biggie. But they graded it this spring, which is nice. Except when that grading rips through your water supply line buried under the road.
To make a long story short, I asked the guy to dig us a trench so we could fix the situation, but he hasn't been back up, so we had to act to get in water for the summer (our barrel is a quarter-mile hike upstream from here).
So we dug. And dug. It's gravel--not easily worked. We dug as much as we could, and then, to protect the PVC line, we hauled an old iron pipe down the creek to slide over the PVC section to protect it (while buried) from trucks rolling over.
It wasn't pretty, but it'll get the job done.
That's the definition of jury rigging (not to be confused with bribing jurors to help one's client).
While now used to describe anything that's makeshift or temporary, it originally was used to describe the replacement of mast and yards in case of damage.
In our case, jury rigging was more fun, as they say, than humans should be allowed to have while standing.

Stating the obvious

Often in covering tragic and dramatic news stories, reporters get carried away and lose their writing discipline. Such was the case with last week's shark attack off Solana Beach, Calif., that killed triathlete David Martin.

Witnesses said he was lifted vertically out of the water by the creature, which retreated after a single bite.

My son, reading the story, caught the error: "lifted vertically." To lift means to raise, and the last time I checked, raising is a vertical movement.