I have a presentation I give sometimes about writing English in a legal context, and one of the pieces of advice I offer in it is to avoid Latin words where possible. It makes legal writing sound more complicated than it needs to be, rarely a good thing in my view. Research shows that clients don’t like it. Sometimes there may be a case for sticking to Latin with terms of art (maybe that’s one for a future blog post), but for now I’ll just look at phrases which have perfectly serviceable everyday English alternatives. I can’t see any reason for not using the English versions. Below is a list of ten to be getting on with.
inter alia - among other things (for some reason this one seems especially popular with Russian lawyers)
ab initio - from the beginning
per se – in itself, of itself
pro rata – in proportion
ad hoc – for this special purpose
bona fide – good faith, (acting) in good faith
male fide – good faith, (acting) in good faith
sine die – indefinitely
prima facie – on first look
pro tem – for the time being
Sometimes I see advice to dispense with abbreviations like i.e. (short for ‘id est’, which can be conveyed by ‘that is’ or in ‘other words)’, e.g. (short for ’exempli grata’, which can be conveyed by ‘for example’, ‘for instance’ or ‘such as’) and etc (short for ‘et cetera’, which can be conveyed by ‘and so on’). I don’t mind these Latin abbreviations, which still seem to be very common usage, though writing the full Latin phrases looks very strange indeed. However, I think that the English alternatives are well worth bearing in mind too.
Another point with Latin, unrelated but interesting to me at least, is how to handle plurals of words that originated in Latin. Forms like ‘stadia’ as the plural of ‘stadium’ or ‘formulae’ as the plural of ‘formula’ are dying out; it now seems quite pretentious to avoid using ‘stadiums’ or ‘formulas’ (though ‘formulae’ clings on specifically in a scientific context).
Meanwhile, nouns like ‘data’ – strictly the plural of ‘datum’ – increasingly tend to be used with a singular verb: ‘this data is misleading’ is preferable to ‘these data are misleading’. (Russian speakers often incline to a plural here, presumably on the basis that they’re used to the Russian equivalent ‘данные’, which is a plural form). As the Guardian Style resource points out, in its journey to becoming a singular noun, ‘data’ is merely following the path of ‘agenda’, which is now only ever seen used as a singular noun despite having started life as a plural form of ‘agendum’.
