BBC News - Wensleydale cheese granted protected status

BBC News reports that my favourite food (after tiramisu) has been given protection - or, rather, to be precise and pedantic, its name is now protected. But actually the story reveals that the protected geographical indication is in fact the tautology (or perhaps pleonasm) 'Yorkshire Wensleydale.' According to Food Manufacture UK (which sounds to me like an oxymoron, or at least it should be) back in 2006 when an application for a protected designation of origin was made, the applicants went for the tautology because it would give them a 'quick win'. The PGI application can be read here, complete with egregious comma splice - why can whoever commissions these documents not find someone familiar with the rules of English grammar, and with some notion of style, to do the work? And the application as published in the Official Journal C231 09.08.2013 (without comma splice) is here. But it looks to me as if the application that was originally made (dated 2007) was for a PDO and has resulted in the registration of a PGI. (It's not as if a PDO has been cancelled: the distinction of being the only UK registration to be cancelled is the Newcastle Brown Ale PGI, which became necessary when brewing was moved to what might be called the wrong side of the Tyne, though having been born in County Durham and raised there until the implication of the Redcliffe-Maud Report I would never use that expression). So they went for the more exclusive right and settled for the weaker one.

Word and/or phrase

Talking the other day to a former colleague and professional pedant (in the best sense of the word: indeed, there should be no bad sense of it) I bemoaned the use of the expression "and/or". Of course, he had a relevant quote, but he rattled it off so quickly that I missed it. I spent a few minutes in the Law Society Library subsequently trying to find what he had been talking about, and came up with some great material - but not what I was after ...

"... that befuddling, nameless thing, that Janus-faced verbal monstrosity, neither word nor phrase, the child of a brain of someone too lazy or too dull to express his precise meaning, or too dull to know what he did mean, now commonly used by lawyers in drafting legal documents, through carelessness or ignorance or as a cunning device to conceal rather than express meaning ..." Employers Mut. Liab. In.s Co. v Tollefsen, 263 N.W. 376, 377 (Wis. 1935), per Fowler J.

And (or or, or both):

"To our way of thinking the abominable invention and/or is as devoid of meaning as it is incapable of classification by the rules of grammar and syntax." American Gen. Ins. Co. v Webster, 118 SW 2d 1082, 1084 (Tex. Civ. App. Beaumont, 1936) per Combs J.

Excellent stuff. The American courts always get there first, and usually say it very well. There are instances over there of statutes being struck down for uncertainty because of their use of the monstrosity. All I found from the English courts - all that merited repeating, anyway - was Lord Reid in John G Stein & Co v O'Hanlon [1965] AC 890, saying that the expression was "not yet part of the English language". In fact, it could be argued - couldn't it? - that he was wrong, by the mere act of uttering it himself. But 21 years earlier Viscount Simon had formulated the most powerful denunciation of the usage - too strong, perhaps, for judicial repetition:

"... the bastard conjunction ... which has, I fear, become the commercial court's contribution to basic English."

Bonito v Fuerst Bros [1944] AC 75, which Robert directed me to after I asked him to repeat it. It's good to know that even with a world war in progress the then Lord Chancellor could find time to try to keep the language on the straight and narrow. A pity that his judgment isn't required reading in law schools.

Oh, and you'll find the sources explored at some, entertaining, length in Miscellany-At-Law by the great Sir Robert Megarry. A book that should be on the shelves of every lawyer - why have I never had a copy?

For anyone looking for a steer: the abomination can usually be replaced just with "or", and if necessary the formulation "A or B, or both" (or, I suppose, "any one or more of A, B and C") can be deployed without damaging the language, or offending a pedantic reader. And it will be clearer what is meant.