25 November 2015, 1 pm
Next I go off to be an imposter at the IPKat IP Editors’ and Publishers’ Lunch. I am not an IP editor or an IP publisher, and although I did once write a blog I had to stop due to its upsetting three people. But I quite like editors and publishers, due to their not being patent attorneys. The lunch is in a very hot room. It is a close-run thing as to who wilts first, the people or the lettuce leaves. The sandwiches are curling at the edges, and they are probably toxic now anyway, their contents having been nicely incubated for an hour or so. I stick to the orange juice. While we stand wilting, we are treated to a speech by someone who is both an IP lawyer and an author. He is cross about sloppy writing. Sloppy writing happens when people don’t stick to the Rules. They split infinitives and they splice commas; they don’t know how to use the subjunctive (were that appropriate); they leave prepositions sitting around at the ends of sentences like baggage blocking an exit through which you were trying to get through. They don’t realise that data is the plural of datum, like alba is the plural of album and i is the plural of us (at the end of a word, anyway, as in Aberdeen Angi). Before you know it they are getting their facts wrong, shoving in malapropisms and inventing wordification strategistics. Some of them do not even know an acronym from an abbreviation. WTF??? At the end of the pedant’s speech, we get to ask questions. Few of us dare, for fear of getting our grammar wrong. However (this being, incidentally, a word the pedant treats with disdain), one brave person does. He is the nice journalist from this morning, who is a historian not a lawyer, and therefore knows that there is a time and a place for old-fashioned artefacts and it is not 2015. He says, Surely the rules of language change? (He is possibly thinking back to his interview with the CIPA President.) Perhaps in time, he adds, we will be writing our legal texts entirely in emojis? The speaker does not reply. Probably he thinks “emoji” is neither an abbreviation nor an acronym but more of an abomination, and anyway if it is not mentioned in Fowler’s then it does not really warrant his attention. The nice journalist challenges us all to develop an emoji for the person skilled in the art. I can certainly think of one for the problem and solution approach; it already exists and in the interests of decorum it is not used in legal texts at the moment. But it could be… Personally, I am not convinced that language needs rules. It should be principles-based, like IP regulation. The only rule should be “Get some words, and put them together in a way that makes sense.” Even I can sometimes do that.
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