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Pronoun: Difference between revisions
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{{pe}}Lawyers don’t like pronouns because they (pronouns, that is, not lawyers) tend to be | {{pe}}Lawyers don’t like pronouns because they (pronouns, that is, not lawyers) tend to be short and idiomatic. | ||
This unnecessarily lowers the bar. Much better is repeated use of the [[noun]]s to which they (the [[pronoun]]s, not the {{tag|noun}}s) might, if they were used, relate. It doesn't change the semantic content much less the legal freighting, but it makes the any text just that little bit less penetrable to those without a direct financial incentive in the job of reading it. | |||
The official excuse has probably something to do with imprecision: “you” and “it” can ambiguously refer to the {{tag|subject}} or {{tag|object}} of a sentence: unlike those ultra-precise Germans, we Englanders only half-heartedly [[declension|decline]] our [[pronoun]]s. For all that, the English language — complete with [[pronoun]]s — works unambiguously well in most other linguistic contexts. Besides, lawyers have their own special form of {{tag|pronoun}}: the {{tag|definition}}. | The official excuse has probably something to do with imprecision: “you” and “it” can ambiguously refer to the {{tag|subject}} or {{tag|object}} of a sentence: unlike those ultra-precise Germans, we Englanders only half-heartedly [[declension|decline]] our [[pronoun]]s. For all that, the English language — complete with [[pronoun]]s — works unambiguously well in most other linguistic contexts. Besides, lawyers have their own special form of {{tag|pronoun}}: the {{tag|definition}}. | ||
{{sa}} | {{sa}} | ||
*[[Chauvinist language]] | *[[Chauvinist language]] | ||