[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase]
Not at all. Much legal language is utterly incomprehensible to people who are not trained in the law. That’s why “plain language” statutes have been passed to mandate that legal language be rendered comprehensible to laypeople. (Legal language has been vetted by court cases so that its meaning has been codified by precedent. That’s why lawyers continue to use it. The more formal, nit-picky, all-encompassing, and non-standard it is the more likely that courts will parse it in a certain way. That doesn’t work for everyday speech.)
The language of law is a jargon. All jargons contain terms that are precisely defined within the jargon but are at variance with the way they are used in common language. This makes sense because it ensures that everybody inside the profession uses the term in the same way. However, this precision does not cross boundaries into other jargons. And nobody can possibly learn all the thousands of jargons that exist.
Generalese is the form of the language that everybody learns to speak, so it is usable by everyone no matter what professional jargon they speak. That makes it by definition - by my definition anyway - the best form of the language. It’s the form of the language everyone uses here on the Dope, in books, in everyday speech, for almost every conceivable need. You only need to learn it once, although continual refinements, accretions, additions, and variations are a fact of life.
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Take, for instance, the Constitution of the United States. At the time it was written, English was different than the language we know today. Naturally they would write it in the clearest language possible, avoiding slang expressions that were likely to fall out of usage or be subject to misinterpretation.
OK, it’s a great document. And as long as we hold it dear, it is fixed in stone. We don’t want this to turn into something like “Animal Farm” where the rules are subtly rephrased or rewritten every time we go back to consult them unless there’s a transparent process and all that. But common usage of the language continues and will change, while that document remains static. With time that gap will likely widen.
Your points about jargon, IMO, are correct. But I think also that if a new law were made today, while it would contain jargon, would also strive for clarity and correctness, and these transcend both legalese and generalese. I didn’t mean to imply that “because it’s legal, it’s the best language.” Rather, I would say, “If it’s going to be in a legal document, courts are going to put the clearest, most correct language in it that they possibly can, because there could be a lot at stake.” Some of that may of course have to be jargon that everyday people won’t understand.
