August 6, 2007

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Disaster

The Minneapolis bridge collapse was a disaster for the language, too:

investigating professionals will remain on scene. They will remain on scene until they understand and see what, in fact, they believe is the causal factor here or a probable series of causal factors.

Yes. The "causal factor". I bet this disaster recovery business is exhausting -- he can't wait to go to sleep in a nice, warm unit of bedular furnishing.

It reminds me of this: when you analyze the text for patterns, law doesn't look like English -- it looks like bytecode.

I first heard of this in a programming textbook. When you're dealing with human beings, you can pack information more densely by being less accurate: similes, analogies, and references all make it easy to say a lot with a little. When you're writing legal code or computer code, you have to make everything you say explicitly clear, because colliding interpretations make vague statements worse than useless.

I can think of an easy way to let government employees talk like humans, without worrying about two million-dollar commas and the like: port the legal code to Prolog, and treat commentary as comments.

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