I groan (inwardly) every time I see or hear the word syllabi at the law school where I teach.

Syllabus has become fully acclimatised and should go the way of normal English plurals: syllabuses.

In the same category is forum. Your Latin teacher (if you had one), would have insisted on the plural fora, of course. Both fora and forums are correct in English (although auto-correct wants to turn fora into for a).

Forums is preferable, and there is judicial authority for this view: see the words of Belobaba J in Leon v Volkswagen AG, …

Some further things to expunge from your professional (and non-professional) vocabulary.

Availability

This is, like functionality, a multisyllabic word that can usefully be replaced by something short and simple – and therefore clear and direct.

Not What’s your availability? A simple Are you free? (or busy or maybe even available) will do fine.

And not I have no availability – just I’m busy.

Piece

People will talk about the employment piece or the environmental piece of a transaction or what-have-you.

Conceptually it’s unobjectionable; it describes a part of a larger whole, an aspect of the bigger picture, …

Burden

In a recent news release, the Ontario Securities Commission said this: ‘Most recently, the OSC announced 107 regulatory changes to reduce burden for market participants while maintaining critical investor protections.’

Good initiative, but the use of burden annoys me. The burden or the regulatory burden would be better: a specific thing, not a general state of affairs. A burden is a discrete load one bears, not the sum of all loads.

The load can be figurative, of course, whether it’s the weight of duty, blame, sin, responsibility, proof or securities regulation.

Stigma

Another word that gets used in the …

British Columbia’s Hansard (the transcripts of the Legislative Assembly) was not published until 1970, making researching the intent behind a piece of pre-1970 legislation challenging.

Happily for researchers, the BC Legislative Assembly Sessional Clippings books from 1891 to 1972 are now available through the University of Victoria. These sessional clippings books “include newspaper accounts written by various legislative reporters who covered debates occurring in the British Columbia Legislative Assembly.”

— Susannah Tredwell…

As used (or not) in the names of countries.

One does still occasionally hear or see the Ukraine, but be careful not to use that around people of Ukrainian origin. They can get very shirty about it.

Their point is that the definite article the makes the country sound more like a region, like the Midwest or the Highlands – and, by implication, a sub-division of some larger entity.

And we all know which larger entity most Ukrainians are not longing to be part of again…

This is all fair enough, geopolitically speaking, but perhaps not linguistically.

First, Ukrainian …

This was the headline of a recent LinkedIn post: Cryptocurrency do’s, don’ts and dangers. Think before you use the apostrophe and you’ll do it correctly: Dos, don’ts and dangers. At least it wasn’t danger’s in the original.

And, without catastrophic apostrophes, it is No ifs, ands or buts.

The possessive forms of women, children and men also seems to cause problems, because they take ‘s (which is more usually attached to a singular noun, not a plural one). As a result, women’s hockey, children’s toys and men’s room.

The compounds menswear, womenswear and …

Not of books, but of dignitaries.

Judges

Stephen Waddams observes in Introduction to the Study of Law (my edition is 1992) that it is not proper to refer to a judge as Your Honour (or My Lord/Lady, where that is still used) outside the courtroom. He advocates just plain Mr Wagner or Ms Karakatsanis, or failing that the old-fashioned Judge (without the person’s surname) when you encounter one in a social setting. Most Canadian lawyers will probably say Justice So-and-so at a cocktail party, if they are not on first-name terms, and this also has the sanction of …

My apologies to readers: this search tip is very BC-specific!

Quickscribe has recently added a useful new feature that allows you to set up an alert to notify you when a specific word or phrase is used in a bill, an order, or Hansard in British Columbia. For example, you could set up an alert to see any Orders that refer to the University Act or an alert to see any references in Hansard to the B.C. Utilities Commission.

To set up an alert, you will need to have access to Quickscribe and have set up a Personal Login. Once you’re …

Canadiana Online’s unparalleled online collection of historical materials is now free to access. The collection, available at no charge at Canadiana.ca, contains more than 60 million digitized pages of books, periodicals, and government publications from early Canadian history. 

Why should lawyers and legal researchers take note of this thrilling development? Canadiana Online features an outstanding collection of historical statutes, bills, legal journals, and law reports. Some examples include:   

• Bills
• Court Rules
• Criminal Law Texts
• Law Reports
• Lawyer Directories
• Sessional Papers
• Statutes

Legal researchers should take advantage of the wealth of legal resources available freely online here.  Canadian …

Grumpy Baby-boomers will oft have cause to make exclamations like this (but they may phrase it in less polite language). Or they may have no cause at all, but exclaim anyway.

One thing that is sure to raise the ire of older professionals is casual language in e-mails.

On this point, the Boomers are not wrong: and certainly the very casual style of the text message has no place in professional correspondence, even when it’s digital. Srsly.

That said, at least two of the abbreviations beloved of texting millennials have an older provenance than you might imagine.

IDK, short …