Meanwhile, in the libel courts…

My original reading of the what the case seemed to be about was that it doesn’t matter whether chiropracty (?) works or not, it is whether or not the article that caused the fuss is read as implying they are frauds (and also not to do with the lower back pain stuff, but the specific claims about being able to fix/help colic, asthma and so on). I didn’t read that into the article personally, but I could sort of vaguely see how the case wouldn’t be immediately thrown out as specious.

Of course if the article is taken as read as implying fraud, then it would be quite difficult to prove this is the case: even if there are a numerous practioners that are behaving fradulently, proving that to any reasonable level of doubt is going to be time consuming and expensive.

The libel case seems to hinge on the word ‘bogus’.

Is “Mr. Justice Cocklecarrot”:http://www.edwards.eclipse.co.uk/JBM-rbd.htm presiding then?

ajay: I’d like to promote chiropraxis as an option here, especially as it would make a good scrabble word.

Appealing against.

Grrrr.

“Appeal the decision” 1,330,000 hits

“Appeal against the decision” 296,000 hits

US population- 300 million
UK population- 60 million

I dunno, Lemmy. If you restrict the search to UK sites the picture does change: 39 100 for ‘appeal’ against 53 900 for ‘appeal against’ but that would still suggest that ‘appeal the decision’ is almost as common as the other construction in British English.

Otoh searching The Lawyer (a UK publication) gives:

<a href=http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=%22appeal+the+decision%22+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.thelawyer.com%2F&btnG=Search&meta= 43 hits

“Appeal against the decision” 21 hits

I think that ‘appeal the decision’ is perfectly acceptable usage in the UK.

surely it should be “chiromancy”.

of course, “chirourgy” is exactly where the word “surgery” comes from.

and we all know how that turned out….

…as well as the verb phrase (‘Jones will appeal against the decision…’) we are comparing…

“Appeal the decision” / “Appeal against the decision”

BBC: 72 / 96
Guardian: 249 / 417

There hasn’t yet been a finding that Singh libelled the BCA. He’s appealing against a preliminary finding concerning the meaning of the word he used to describe chiropractic treatments for conditions such as infant colic: ‘bogus’. The judge ruled that it meant he was accusing chiropractors of knowingly selling treatments they knew to be useless, despite the fact that in the article he made it clear that this was not what he meant. This ruling makes it difficult for Singh to defend himself against the charge of libel, since he would have to prove true a claim he never made and does not believe. Nevertheless, he has not (yet) been found to have committed libel.

One appeals a decision to a higher court, does one not? Inserting ‘against’ in that context would seem odd, but what do I know, I’ve only been speaking English all my life…

@23: never in all my life have I come across that “avails of” usage, but then, ditto…

Chiropractors roam the streets frightening little children.

Surely we’ve agreed by this point that both forms are acceptable to different speakers and liable to dialectal variation. Moreover, the pleonasm that people are detecting in “appeal against” has cross-linguistic parallels. Verbal constructions in Ancient Greek, for example, that involve inherently negative ideas can introduce subordinate clauses with or without the negative particle μὴ (mÄ“). The verb ἀμφισβητέω (amphisbÄ“téō) “to dispute” — the closest I can get to “appeal” since the legal term in Athenian law derives from a verb meaning to “leave to” [a higher tribunal] — regularly introduces clauses with and without μὴ with essentially the same meaning. Perhaps the nuance is that without the negative particle, the verb (like English appeal might if we ignore the pragmatics) leaves open the reading that the subject is maintaining or advancing the object of the verb as opposed to disputing it. But surely no one would think that “appealing the decision” means supporting it.

Bryan Garner is the grand poobah of legal usage, and notes that in American English, one “usually” appeals *from* a judgment, though “nearly as often” the verb is used transitively, so that one appeals a conviction, judgment, etc.

In British English, says Garner, “one *appeals against* a lower court’s decree.”

See his Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage, 2d ed. (a very useful book).

Thanks, Anderson. I suppose it’s an Americanism then, but one that is on its way to becoming standard.

Can’t resist a few more abstrusities:

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.).

One hopes that someone will call Dr Strabismus (whom God preserve) of Utrecht as an expert witness.

“I could argue (if it is worth arguing about) that since it is a semi-technical term relating to legal, and only by extension quasi-legal, proceedings, usage in legal contexts sets the standard.”

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.

Barry @39: no-one, even the originator of the topic – whose one-liner added an emotivistic gloss and clearly wasn’t intended nor expected to give rise to this earnest and inoffensive discussion, is actually suggesting that this is of importance to the original topic, or is of more than of marginal decidability, or is capable of impugning anyone’s on-topic comments. It’s (gasp) tangential.

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?

Is the middle sentence so marked? If so, I don’t get it.

“There is a well-established extended usage of “bogus” that does not imply deliberate fraud, merely nonfunctionality (which, whatever you think of chiropractice, isn’t libel even by English standards, AFAIK). ”

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.