Plain Nonsense Trumps Jargonthe cost of wizardspeak comes due in our time
Trying to bat down the White House’s “association” between acetaminophen and autism with “correlation does not imply causation” is losing the rematch the way you lost the title. If outsiders can spin your field so middle schoolers understand, but you and your colleagues only respond with more jargon, you are not even a fair match. You’re a punching bag making satisfying “puff” noises as more of the air gets beaten out of you.
Fine points on Latinate terms like “association” become weaknesses as soon as answering up requires more than a united front of your own. Heaping on nominalizations like “correlation” and “causation” won’t reach the people who don’t hear “association” like you do in the first place. For any willful distortion especially, they are the audience. It actually hurts that the go-to zinger rhymes. It makes it so fun and easy for insiders to repeat that it edges out any other, perhaps plainer expressions.
I could offer “refutation does not entail comprehension” here, and perhaps that would stick. It would still miss the point. That’s not common English, either.
Responding effectively means speaking to be understood by a lot more people, without any hint that you expect to impress them. A ready stock of relatable metaphors. A cheat sheet of lived examples. Parables for the present day.
I’m sure the art of the telling has advanced since “ice cream does not cause drownings” back when I was in school. Yet despite seeing no little coverage of this new autism line, I couldn’t tell you the go-to case of a medical treatment wrongly ditched before the data actually condemned it. That talking point is simply missing in action.
I write about this not to score inter-specialty rivalry points. I’ve never seen the booth where we can trade those in for prizes. I write because law’s been on the ropes, too, tripping in a tangle of it own untied bootlaces.
Lawyer talk also has Magic Latin Disease. Big time. Plus Bunk French and a penchant for hijacking actual English. I’ve no better hope for dusty constitutional clunkers like “habeas corpus”, “attainder”, and “ex post facto” in the line of modern rhetorical fire.
So little of “English Liberty” wound up in actual English in our constitution. We could find that shocking if we didn’t know full well how this happens to speech. The obscure lingo and dusty decorum that make students feel like admitted wizards in law school, then shield them from muggle meddling in practice, have their price. Scrambling for competence and acceptance, then achieving them by wielding the new language, we get no systematic practice making plain to others, or even to ourselves, what our cryptic incantations have to do with important stories and lessons of the past. Without the voice to speak right back down to that grounding, our fancy warbling comes to seem rootless, the weird, constructed language of some long-inherited mass-consensual fairy land of lawyers.
The rhetorical pressure on the details blows out the other end of the language. Ever more often, glittering generalities like “freedom” and “liberty” don’t summon the magic like they used to, because they’ve served too long as mere call-outs to a vague collective will to keep things calmly carrying on. As terms, they may have been defined somewhere, but they weren’t renewed by usage in frank, informal conversations. If they don’t stand for specific stories, they can mean nearly anything. Once openly contested, they do.
We’re seeing lower-court judges mash the panic button now, trying to address the public directly. But they’re doing it pages deep into twelve-point, double-spaced, Times New Roman PDFs, hidden behind boilerplate for we-can-decide-this and here’s-how-we-do-our-job, minced with cryptic Bluebook citations, then buried on one of hundreds of bad .gov websites or locked behind a shameful publicly funded paywall. This grim gauntlet for human attention ensures that only scant quotes picked by the gaunt carrion birds of the headline-driven media make it out to broader circulation.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court pauses court order after order against executive action, often without a word of explanation. The “emergency” animating the suddenly lively emergency docket seems more and more like great haste to rewrite the rule that says the legislature can limit who the president can fire, on the way to a more “unitary executive”. Such a rush, indeed, that they want the game played by the new rules right now, even before they get around tow writing them, much less publishing reasons for them.
These are tense times, but there is opportunity here, as well. The political moment makes it suddenly expedient to do what has too long been put off. Test our understandings of the foundations of our fields by proving we can put them in plain terms other people understand. Revisit the styles and habits of work that have grown so insular, strange, self-referential, and isolating over time. Work on legitimacy, rather than expect it to come of its own for any job well done.
It’s no great joy to know the costs as well as the benefits of the way we specialists get things done. But there is dignity in facing them.
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