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Wiktionary has a category on English legal doublets .
A legal doublet is a standardized phrase used frequently in English legal language consisting of two or more words that are irreversible binomials and frequently synonyms, usually connected by "and", such as "null and void". The order of the words cannot be reversed, as it would be seen as particularly unusual to ask someone to desist and cease or to have property owned clear and free, when these common legal phrases are universally known as cease and desist and free and clear.
The doubling—and sometimes even tripling—often originates in the transition from use of one language for legal purposes to another: in Britain, from a native English term to a Latin or Law French term; in Romance-speaking countries, from Latin to the vernacular. To ensure understanding, the terms from both languages were used. This reflected the interactions between Germanic and Roman law following the decline of the Roman Empire. These phrases are often pleonasms [1] and form irreversible binomials.
In other cases the two components have differences which are subtle, appreciable only to lawyers, or obsolete. For example, ways and means , referring to methods and resources respectively, [2] are differentiable, in the same way that tools and materials, or equipment and funds, are differentiable—but the difference between them is often practically irrelevant to the contexts in which the irreversible binomial ways and means is used today in non-legal contexts as a mere cliché.
Doublets may also have arisen or persisted because the solicitors and clerks who drew up conveyances and other documents were paid by the word, which tended to encourage verbosity. [3]
Their habitual use has been decried by some legal scholars as "redundant" and superfluous in modern legal briefs. [1]
In classical rhetoric and logic, begging the question or assuming the conclusion is an informal fallacy that occurs when an argument's premises assume the truth of the conclusion. Historically, begging the question refers to a fault in a dialectical argument in which the speaker assumes some premise that has not been demonstrated to be true. In modern usage, it has come to refer to an argument in which the premises assume the conclusion without supporting it. This makes it an example of circular reasoning.
An idiom is a phrase or expression that largely or exclusively carries a figurative or non-literal meaning, rather than making any literal sense. Categorized as formulaic language, an idiomatic expression's meaning is different from the literal meanings of each word inside it. Idioms occur frequently in all languages; in English alone there are an estimated twenty-five thousand idiomatic expressions. Some well known idioms in English are spill the beans, it's raining cats and dogs, and break a leg.
The English philologist and author J. R. R. Tolkien created several constructed languages, mostly related to his fictional world of Middle-earth. Inventing languages, something that he called glossopoeia, was a lifelong occupation for Tolkien, starting in his teens.
Literal and figurative language is a distinction that exists in all natural languages; it is studied within certain areas of language analysis, in particular stylistics, rhetoric, and semantics.
A cliché is a saying, idea, or element of an artistic work that has become overused to the point of losing its original meaning, novelty, or figurative or artistic power, even to the point of now being bland or uninteresting. In phraseology, the term has taken on a more technical meaning, referring to an expression imposed by conventionalized linguistic usage.
Pleonasm is redundancy in linguistic expression, such as in "black darkness," "burning fire," "the man he said," or "vibrating with motion." It is a manifestation of tautology by traditional rhetorical criteria. Pleonasm may also be used for emphasis, or because the phrase has become established in a certain form. Tautology and pleonasm are not consistently differentiated in literature.
In Modern English, he is a singular, masculine, third-person pronoun.
In sociolinguistics, a variety, also known as a lect or an isolect, is a specific form of a language or language cluster. This may include languages, dialects, registers, styles, or other forms of language, as well as a standard variety. The use of the word variety to refer to the different forms avoids the use of the term language, which many people associate only with the standard language, and the term dialect, which is often associated with non-standard language forms thought of as less prestigious or "proper" than the standard. Linguists speak of both standard and non-standard (vernacular) varieties as equally complex, valid, and full-fledged forms of language. Lect avoids the problem in ambiguous cases of deciding whether two varieties are distinct languages or dialects of a single language.
In common law, a hue and cry is a process by which bystanders are summoned to assist in the apprehension of a criminal who has been witnessed in the act of committing a crime.
In computer science, a pointer is an object in many programming languages that stores a memory address. This can be that of another value located in computer memory, or in some cases, that of memory-mapped computer hardware. A pointer references a location in memory, and obtaining the value stored at that location is known as dereferencing the pointer. As an analogy, a page number in a book's index could be considered a pointer to the corresponding page; dereferencing such a pointer would be done by flipping to the page with the given page number and reading the text found on that page. The actual format and content of a pointer variable is dependent on the underlying computer architecture.
A cease and desist letter is a document sent by one party, often a business, to warn another party that they believe the other party is committing an unlawful act, such as copyright infringement, and that they will take legal action if the other party continues the alleged unlawful activity. The letter may warn that, if the recipient does not discontinue specified conduct, or take certain actions, by deadlines set in the letter, the letter's recipient may be sued. The phrase "cease and desist" is a legal doublet, made up of two near-synonyms. A cease and desist letter issued by a government entity, called a cease and desist order, is "a warning of impending judicial enforcement".
Hendiadys is a figure of speech used for emphasis—"The substitution of a conjunction for a subordination". The basic idea is to use two words linked by the conjunction "and" instead of the one modifying the other. English names for hendiadys include two for one and figure of twins. Although the underlying phrase is Greek: ἓν διὰ δυοῖν, romanized: hen dia duoin, lit. 'one through two', the only other forms occasionally found in English are '''hendiaduo''' and '''hendiaduous''', the latter of which the 17th-century English Biblical commentator Matthew Poole used in his commentary on Genesis 3:16, Proverbs 1:6, and Isaiah 19:20.
Harcourt was an American publishing firm with a long history of publishing fiction and nonfiction for adults and children. The company was last based in San Diego, California, with editorial/sales/marketing/rights offices in New York City and Orlando, Florida, and was known at different stages in its history as Harcourt Brace, & Co. and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. From 1919 to 1982, it was based in New York City.
Ents are sentient beings in J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy world of Middle-earth who closely resemble trees; their leader is Treebeard of Fangorn forest. Their name is derived from an Old English word for "giant".
In linguistics and stylistics, an irreversible binomial, frozen binomial, binomial freeze, binomial expression, binomial pair, or nonreversible word pair is a pair of words used together in fixed order as an idiomatic expression or collocation. The words have a semantic relationship usually involving the words and or or. They also belong to the same part of speech: nouns, adjectives, or verbs. The order of word elements cannot be reversed.
Legal writing involves the analysis of fact patterns and presentation of arguments in documents such as legal memoranda and briefs. One form of legal writing involves drafting a balanced analysis of a legal problem or issue. Another form of legal writing is persuasive, and advocates in favor of a legal position. Another form involves drafting legal instruments, such as contracts and wills.
Legal English, also known as legalese, is a register of English used in legal writing. It differs from day-to-day spoken English in a variety of ways including the use of specialized vocabulary, syntactic constructions, and set phrases such as legal doublets.
Sonnet 87 is one of 154 sonnets published by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare in 1609. It is part of the Fair Youth sequence, and sometimes included as the last sonnet in the Rival Poet group.
It takes two to tango is a common idiomatic expression which suggests something in which more than one person or other entity are paired in an inextricably-related and active manner, occasionally with negative connotations.