Look, I absolutely support Singh in his case, but I think any judge would have found the statement “This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments” to be defamatory, whether or not conscious fraud is implied. Imputing reckless disregard for evidence of efficacy to a supposed medical professional body is quite clearly defamation. Eady’s interpretation – which I think is far from unreasonable given Singh’s use of “happily”, while not the only possible interpretation – just makes a defence of justification much harder than it would be under the unconscious interpretation.

The trial judge, most likely, hadn’t been exposed to the extended usage and made the same snap judgment you did.

The original line of discussion seemed and still seems to have dried up. If you any substantive remarks on either subject – or indeed on anything – why not post them instead of ‘disrupting’ the thread still further?

I have a running argument with a linguist friend of mine about this. Otherwise a descriptivist, I argue that with regard to technical language and proper nouns a prescriptive rule is appropriate. It seems to me that in these limited cases, there is, in fact, an authoritative body who rightfully is able to determine proper usage.

There is a vast gray area, of course, when technical language has been appropriated by common language. In those cases, I argue that to the degree to which the particular usage is technical is the degree to which the prescriptive usage is more appropriate.

A particular point in contention in this argument is the specific case of proper names. This isn’t very controversial, even to staunch descriptivist linguists, with regard to personal proper names. More controversial, I think, are place names. In my opinion, we should prefer the place names used by those who arguably occupy or are most familiar with those places. Language translations should be transliterations, not loose translations and certainly not the locally preferred term for some far away place.

I think that in these cases the descriptivists begin to act quite a lot like prescriptivists. The argument for descriptivism is that the prescriptivist notion that there’s some authoritative description of proper usage of common language is contrary to the modern scientific understanding of language. There is no authority. What is “correct” is what is used. However, technical language and proper names are different. There are authorities in both cases. There is someone with the authority to say that word X means Y and the correct word for thing Y is X. Otherwise, though, language is democratic.

I’ve seen comment threads disrupted by insults, arguments and people being *holes, but semantic nitpickery like this is just as anoying.

If you need a threat to enforce the fines, just send a chiropractor around.

DJ @30 – I don’t know what the ‘[s?]beteo’ bit is, but since amphi is ‘both’, might that use of ‘dispute’ be closer in meaning to ‘debate’ than to ‘challenge’? In any case I don’t think the present issue is really much to do with the way negatives behave in ancient Greek, though that in turn reminds me of the story in which a lecturer points out that while a double negative can in different languages make either a negative or a positive , there is no example of a double positive making a negative. From the back, a wag pipes up ‘Yeah, yeah!’… It’s the way I tell ‘em.

Re: the greek legal term being derived from ‘leave to’ – that is itself pertinent since it suggests a (possibly somewhat) different concept, as perhaps does ‘appeal the decision to’. In the latter case, ‘appeal’ is near-substitutable by ‘refer’. A semantical justification for insisting (as I don’t) on the ‘appealing against’ usage might be that in hearing an appeal, the higher court does not reconsider the case, but only specific challenges to aspects of it (albeit usually ones which are relevant to the overall outcome, of course). It’s not like if Mum says no ask Dad. The decision isn;t handed over in its entirety to be reworked. Giving leave to appeal is not like ordering a retrial. There is an appellant and a respondent, not two appellants. And other gnomic utterances. (Though Sleepy is a dwarf. Go figure.).

I wonder what Singh thinks of acupuncture?