Legal Terminology

I’m a vocabulary geek.  In high school, I was driving every other person crazy asking what a word meant in the advanced books I was reading, and after being asked to shut up enough times, I started bringing a dictionary with me wherever I went.  Never could read it cover to cover (way too boring) but every time I came across a strange word in my increasingly advanced novels, there the dictionary was to save my life.

I don’t really get to use any of these words in my everyday speech; people still get upset when they don’t know what I’m saying.  But I love having that cache of words locked away inside my head.

I started my Court Reporting program back in July and the best thing about it for me is all the new terminology I get to learn.  The idea is that if you’re going to be writing what everybody in court is saying, you might as well know how it’s spelled and what it means.

Currently, I’m going through all the legal terminology, which is just fascinating.  I always assumed the “moot” as in “moot point” was something along the lines of empty or meaningless.  Turns out that “moot” actually means “arguable or debatable, but to be settled outside of court.”

I’ve seen the abbreviation et al. come up again and again without any idea what’s going on.  Apparently, it stands for “et alius” meaning “and another.” If there’s a group of folks with the names of Yarborough, Deegan, Spielberg, and Lucas, you could refer to them as “Yarborough, et al.”

Then there’s the words for the law’s legal words: a “lexicon” is a dictionary of legal terms but then the “Corpus Juris Secundum” is an encyclopedia of laws that attorney’s use for reference.  Who knew?

The best part about this is that once I’m done with the legal, eventually I’ll move onto the medical.  I may start to have some idea of what’s going on in those TV doctor dramas.

Of course, the trouble is that few outside my program is ever going to care.  Heck, there’s few inside my program that even care.  There’s just in it to make money.  I don’t think I’ll ever win.