There are no metaphors in a trust deed
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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. 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.[1]
“There are no metaphors in a trust deed” because legal language is designed to remove — maybe minimise — any possibility for alternative interpretation. This is not meant to be some hermeneutic dialog between reader and text here where everyone is free to play their own language games — the words are meant to carry their own, singular, categorical, unambiguous meaning — so there is no room for figurative interpretations and Gadamer can stick it up his jumper — 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.
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- ↑ This is not to say that no lawyers do speak to their children in legalese, however. Some are so inured to their habit of convolution that they can’t help it.