Black's Law Dictionary

I'd like to thank The Federal Lawyer for bringing me the news (in its May 2012 issue) that there is a new edition of Black's Law Dictionary available, the 9th.

This is not to say that I plan to rush out and buy it.   My own quite limited need for legal lexicography is still satisfied by the very old (4th edition!) Black's that sits on the shelf above my desk. Still, it is good to see the mind of Black’s editor Bryan Garner at work as he explains the principles that have been guiding him over years of work on the evolution of this reference text.

He writes that at least as recently as the 6^th edition Black’s contained definitions for (just taking examples from the Bs): botulism, bouche (mouth), bough of a tree, bought, bouncer, bourg, boulevard, bourgeois, Brabant,brabanter, and brachium maris.

“These can hardly be counted as legal terms worthy of inclusion in a true law dictionary,” he says. So presumably he has been weeding out such things.

Challenged, I looked up “bough of a tree,” in my old Black’s Fourth. I learned (or was reminded, I think I had heard it before) that the bough of a tree in feudal law was a symbol, it “gave seisin of land.” In other words, a feudal lord would hand a tenant who owed him fealty a bough of a tree taken from a plot of land, as a way of saying, “this plot is now yours to possess and work [so long as I continue to get my cut.]” It was the same sort of symbolic gesture we see today when a landlord hands you the keys to your new apartment, often with a bit of a flourish!

Knowing this, my dear reader, do you think Mr Garner should be boasting about having excluded such words in his own re-workings? Or do you think it made some sense to include this legal-history tidbit. Let us thrash it out here!

Dictionaries

There's a fascinating blog entry about the history of lexicography here.

I'll skip to one neat paragraph, which that blogger is quoting from a professor at Rutgers:

Johnson's Dictionary contains many of these hard words, and for word lovers they can be delightful. There you'll find nidification, meaning "the act of building nests," and gemelliparous, "bearing twins." Scrabble players will delight in words like ophiophagous ("Serpent-eating"), galericulate ("Covered as with a hat"), or decacuminated ("Having the top cut off"). But Johnson was not entirely comfortable with them: "I am not always certain," he said, "that they are read in any book but the works of lexicographers" (preface, pp. 87-88). He was right. Consider the word naulage, which appears in nearly a hundred books in the eighteenth century alone. The problem is that every one of those books is a dictionary. They all tell us that naulage means the fee paid to carry freight by sea, but there's no indication the word was ever used even by those paid to carry freight by sea.

Most of those words would simply annoy a scrabble player, since you never have enough tiles to spell galericulate anyway.

Still, they are fun. Assuming that "naulage" was never used, how did it get invented? Johnson was implying that the authors of such reference works were copying from each other. And in the case of "maulage" the word would sound plausible anyway, so would be copied without much compunction. Haulage + nautical = naulage!

Perhaps the first author to use it intended it as a trap. He might have figured if somebody copied it, he'd have proof that person had stolen from him. That trap worked wildly well, then, with nearly a hundred steals!

Anyway, as I word lover myself I'm going to be on the lookout for opportunities to use "naulage."