Sour Grapes

Of course we're Fair and Balanced!

Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by Blogger, SDF, my employer or my family, but they should be.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Blog home
Blog archives
Web home
Contact
Legend Consulting
Justin's blog
(not updated since Aug 2009)

Results of 2 Nov 2004 General Election (winners in bold; click on office for more detail)

PA State House of Representatives—152nd District
- Ross Schriftman (D)
- Sue Cornell (R-incumbent)
State Attorney General
- Jim Eisenhower (D)
- Marakay Rogers (Green)
- John Ewbank (Libertarian)
- Tom Corbett (R)
State Auditor
- Jack Wagner (D)
- Ben Price (Green)
- Berlie Etzel (Libertarian)
- Joe Peters (R)
State Treasurer
- Max Lampenfeld (Constitution)
- Robert Casey (D)
- Paul Teese (Green)
- Darryl Perry (Libertarian)
- J. Craige Pepper (R)
US House of Representatives—13th District
US Senate
President

Tools

since 12 Apr 2004

Where in the world are visitors to this page located?
(Month-to-date totals since 15 July 2007)

"and/or" considered harmful

Today's mailing from Plain English Campaign has an interesting tidbit on the use of "and/or," at least in legal documents.

When we are editing documents, we will occasionally find ourselves debating the use of "and/or" with a writer.
In our experience, it tends to confuse rather than clarify, and will often be ambiguous.
But we discovered this week that such an objection is far from being a 'new-fangled' idea as some people claim.

Writing in Lawyers Weekly, Judge Mark P Painter revealed that a court in Wisconsin had condemned the phrase in 1935. The state's Supreme Court concluded that "[W]e are confronted with the task of first construing 'and/or,' that befuddling, nameless thing, that Janus-faced verbal monstrosity, neither word nor phrase, the child of a brain of someone too lazy or too dull to express his precise meaning, or too dull to know what he did mean, now commonly used by lawyers in drafting legal documents, through carelessness or ignorance..."

Original post by Namenlosen Trinker at 4/30/2004 04:42:00 PM Eastern time :: 0 comment(s) ::

0 comment(s):

Blog home
Blog archives

         2003

         2004

         2005

         2006

         2007

         2008

         2009

         2010

         2011

         2012

         2013

Justice (Civil Liberties, so-called Intellectual Property, Privacy & Secrecy); Politics & Government (International, National, State, Local); Humor (Irony & the Funny or Unusual); Science & Technology (Astronomy, Computers, the Internet, e-Voting, Crypto, Physics & Space); Communication (Books, Film, Media, Music & the English Language); Economics (Corporatism & Consumerism); and Items of Purely Personal Note (including Genealogy, Photography, Religion & Spirituality).