Formerly an NYU Law student's, then a second-year law firm associate's, now just my attempts at coherence. Guaranteed pedantry or your complete lack of money back.
Thursday
Depleted Bullets
Whoever had the idea to play “Caroline, No” on the radio today immediately following a discussion of Caroline Kennedy's withdrawal of her name from consideration for appointment as senator: thanks, you made me laugh.
I really liked the symbolism about how the new Whitehouse.gov was so much more open to being indexed by search engines than the old one, and was therefore disappointed to find out that there's no there there.
In writing this post I was interested to discover that “there is no there there” is a Gertrude Stein quote and originally referred to her experience of returning to her childhood home of Oakland after decades away from it.
Of course I can't resist commenting on the inauguration oath flub. I didn't notice the mis-placement of “faithfully” while listening, I did notice when Roberts replaced “President of” with “President to.” I liked this post about the slip-up a lot, and another had some interesting material about how one popular style manual for legal writing may have been at fault for Roberts's error.
And finally, a well thought out recent commentary on the “enormity” usage mentioned in the “I can't resist” link above. I continue to hold to the line that given its possible meaning of monstrousness, the word enormity shouldn't be used in any context where it's even remotely possible that it means monstrousness unless the speaker or writer using it intends it to mean monstrousness.
UPDATE: I'm linking to this important story indicating that as of now the Obama Administration is continuing the Bush Administration policy of launching missile attacks against suspected adversaries in Pakistan for the trivial reason of its author's choice to awkwardly write the unsplit infinitive, “to pursue more aggressively” rather than the more natural “to more aggressively pursue.”
