Joseph Kimble News Today

HUNTINGTON — The following information was provided by reports from the Huntington Police Department:

During the recent election, the Republican-nominated candidates for the Michigan Supreme Court proclaimed their fidelity to rule-of-law judging. No judge would deny that their job is to apply the law as written. Beyond that, though, what’s wrong with the description? Broadly speaking, two things.

Michigan lawyers no doubt know that general (lay) dictionaries played an outsize role in the court’s decision-making for the two decades between 2000 and 2020 — and perhaps still do. But I wonder whether lawyers appreciate the extent to which that was true.

BATON ROUGE - Police say 17-year old Markeith Franklin died after being shot Friday evening.

BATON ROUGE - Police say 17-year old Markeith Franklin died after being shot Friday evening in the 8500 block of Scotland Avenue.

The Michigan Supreme Court has established the Michigan Rules of Evidence Review Committee in an effort to remain as consistent as possible with the federal

Top leadership in Washington hardly valued clear, concise or correct communication over the last few years. Presidential musings routinely veered into indecipherability. “I call it the black hole,” said Annetta Cheek, a former bureaucrat in her mid-70s who helped launch the government’s plain language movement. But the deep state of Plain Language persevered. A loose network of jargon critics, crusaders for clarity and gatekeepers of grammar, they regularly invoke the little-known Plain W...

Jargon critics, crusaders for clarity and gatekeepers of grammar nudge a government predisposed to over-complication and incomprehensibility toward making sense. They stubbornly drag the bureaucracy along, using methods that are generally subtle and gentle but occasionally blunt.

  Following my lament (Diary, Thursday) about interviewees starting all their sentences with “So”, a number of readers have made heartfelt pleas that I should campaign against another linguistic scourge of our times, “In terms of”. Alas, I fear that may be even more futile. I agree with the great lexicographer HW Fowler that compound prepositions in general are bad news. He thought them “almost the worst element in modern English, stuffing up what is written with a com...