There are no metaphors in a trust deed

There are no metaphors in a trust deed speaks to the facile attempt of lawyers to remove ambiguity from a language which is intrinsically shot through with it.

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Legal language is a special variety of discourse: It is meant to be a bit like a racing car. Amazing at its particular purpose; useless for anything else. The same way you wouldn’t take a Formula One car to the shops, you wouldn’t speak to your children in legalese.

“There are no metaphors in a trust deed” because legal language is designed to remove — maybe minimise — any possibility for alternative interpretation. The aim is to align the information content with its natural Shannon entropy — to allow but one true meaning.

The legal eagle aspires not to be Proust nor, for all the crime and punishment reading her prose implies, Dostoevsky. She leaves no room for figurative interpretations. Her draft is not meant to be some hermeneutic dialog between reader and text where everyone is free to play their own language games: Gadamer can stick it up his jumper. Her words are meant to carry their own, singular, categorical, unambiguous meaning and freight it to all of the world.

So it’s odd, then, that specialist legal language is such porridge.

It is porridge, but railing against it, and saying it should not be so, is to miss the point. The point is to understand the system dynamics that have made it so. That is the key to delivering the world from porridge.

See also

• Semantic code project