Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia alleges in his dissent to the ruling on King v. Burwell that “words no longer have meaning.” Scalia claims that language is futile if “an Exchange that is established by the State is not ‘established by the State,’ ” but rather “by the State and Federal Government. That of course is absurd.”
After prolonged deliberation, the Supreme Court of the American Lexicon sees fit to hand down its own ruling as to whether all words have lost their meanings. This court has heard from scientists who have assessed individual phonemes and morphemes for sudden declines in import as well as from nihilists, deconstructionists, and existential philosophers who have urged the court to manufacture meaning out of nothingness. Justices have attempted to communicate with each other across an impressive mahogany table. The extent to which our own various mutterings and bloviatings and grandstandings made any sense at all was fastidiously charted. Finally, the court consulted Justice Scalia’s own glossary of transparently made-up words in an effort to more wisely adumbrate the line between significance and pure fairyland castle argle-bargle.
The Court finds on this twenty-fifth day of June in the year 2015:
- THAT in light of the precedent established by Ducking v. Autocorrect, 2008, a departure from the realm of specificity determined by the principle of intended meaning does not preclude the more general term meaning from being applicable
- THAT the feeble argument that definitions of which one disapproves are in fact nonsense is a curious bit of casuistry unworthy of a court of our stature (see Santorum v. Savage, 2003)
- THAT Justice Scalia’s many vivid and delightful coinages—e.g. “interpretative jiggery-pokery,” “Platonic golf”—presuppose a language capable of generating new and essentially comprehensible elements, relative to the descriptivist provision in Malaprop v. Jones, 1896
Netanyahu speaking to the Pope, “I am going to hell. I have killed innocent Palestinian children.”And the Pope says, “I know a way out of hell. Gather up as many Palestinian children as you can and raise them as good Muslims.”
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia alleges in his dissent to the ruling on King v. Burwell that “words no longer have meaning.” Scalia claims that language is futile if “an Exchange that is established by the State is not ‘established by the State,’ ” but rather “by the State and Federal Government. That of course is absurd.”
After prolonged deliberation, the Supreme Court of the American Lexicon sees fit to hand down its own ruling as to whether all words have lost their meanings. This court has heard from scientists who have assessed individual phonemes and morphemes for sudden declines in import as well as from nihilists, deconstructionists, and existential philosophers who have urged the court to manufacture meaning out of nothingness. Justices have attempted to communicate with each other across an impressive mahogany table. The extent to which our own various mutterings and bloviatings and grandstandings made any sense at all was fastidiously charted. Finally, the court consulted Justice Scalia’s own glossary of transparently made-up words in an effort to more wisely adumbrate the line between significance and pure fairyland castle argle-bargle.
The Court finds on this twenty-fifth day of June in the year 2015:
- THAT in light of the precedent established by Ducking v. Autocorrect, 2008, a departure from the realm of specificity determined by the principle of intended meaning does not preclude the more general term meaning from being applicable
- THAT the feeble argument that definitions of which one disapproves are in fact nonsense is a curious bit of casuistry unworthy of a court of our stature (see Santorum v. Savage, 2003)
- THAT Justice Scalia’s many vivid and delightful coinages—e.g. “interpretative jiggery-pokery,” “Platonic golf”—presuppose a language capable of generating new and essentially comprehensible elements, relative to the descriptivist provision in Malaprop v. Jones, 1896
- THAT the preposterous and outlandish