Just a brief post today. I had forgotten about this Steven Pinker quote I shared elsewhere a few years back.

“Judges are not very good linguists. For better or worse, they try to find a way around the most natural interpretation of a sentence if it would stand in the way of the outcome they feel is just.”

Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct

The fact is that they do not care about the lack of specificity of language. Politicos revel in the fact that they can torture language into submission to meet their own objectives. This is the power of rhetoric.

As I have reviewed my posts over the past couple of years, it seems I repeat myself, repeat myself, repeat myself, repeat… I get a sudden urge to capture a notion, and it turns out that I had already written about it before. I’d just forgotten.

What I need to do is to formulate a cogent distilled version, but I can’t quite seem to get there. For now, I’ll just share this.