Ouf.

I was just thinking earlier in the week that it had been a while since I'd made a statue, and feeling The Urge in an abstract sense that had no actual tangible project.

I was gonna work tonight. I think I know how the next bit goes. (Yesterday was 362 words, even.)

Then I had a lengthy conversation with blacktarrant, and spent four hours making statue instead.

My back is not happy that I spent this time hunched over workspace doing fiddly stuff. My back can go hang.

There will be photos eventually (after it's fired and painted), but as this is a gift for blacktarrant, I won't be posting them until after I've confirmed receipt and stuff.

I am pleased with results.

Tomorrow there will be Much communing with the buzzy pillow.

Ow. Fall down now.

Language and Law

A thread on the SDMB wandered off into tangent-land, to which I just contributed. I had a thought that I didn't add, though; it would have been way too tangent-land.

I copy my post, which was on the subject of whether legal discussions were ever accessible to the layman, or whether years of specific targeted study are required to make sense of legal discourse:

I think the most complicated thing about grasping law comes about because its terms of art haven't seeped into popular discourse to the level that other professions' terms of art have. Any profession will have particular tendencies of language usage, but lack of familiarity with the jargon makes it harder to get the hang of how to make the shift in language.

I worked in a law office for a year (starting as a receptionist and eventually as a legal secretary). One of the things that helped me grasp the jargon (aside from the rote modification of documents) was that on slow days I could pick up something that we were working on and ask the junior partner, "Okay, why is this language this way?" With occasional, "So what does this word mean in this context?" (I got a more nuanced understanding when I picked up a paralegal cert in night classes -- pretty much purely for love of the subject, though the prospect of a pay raise was also a factor. ;) But it was mostly application and a few of the more specific nuances; I already had the language.)

My experience is that basic understanding is pretty easy to pick up. It all behaves according to rules; the really fiddly applications of those rules take a while to pick up, but that's going to be the case with any set of rules.

The thing that occurred to me as I was writing that, though, is that law is a profession where all the visible to the layman tools are language-based. Which means I'm wondering if the "anyone can do language, so anyone can do that" thing is getting frustrated here.

I compare and contrast with writing. "Anyone can do language so anyone can do that" leads to dismissing the work that goes into a novel by some folks, and, "Oh, yeah, one of these days I'm going to write a bestselling novel" from others. Law, though -- the language isn't the same language. People who go at it expecting it to be conversational English (or whatever) aren't going to be able to follow it. So it turns into a black art requiring years of study in the mythology surrounding the field, because since everyone can do language, if the language isn't immediately accessible, there must be Some Big Secret.