The words covered in this article are discretion, discreet, indiscreet and indiscretion, incumbent, perspicuous and perspicuity, intelligible and unintelligible, articulate and inarticulate, and recondite. Previously done words that will reoccur today are promulgation, antithesis, subjective, incoherent, anomaly, proscription, idolatry, and veneration.
The Founding Fathers of the United States wanted their country to be administered by known, understood and fixed laws with an absolute minimum of personal discretion. This was what John Adams, the second U.S. President and one of the Founding Fathers, meant when he wrote in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 that all the three branches of government – executive, legislative, and judicial – would be dedicated to one goal: “to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.”
(Note: in the above quote, the word ‘end’ is used in the sense of ‘goal’.)
Discretion
The noun discretion means judgment.
A person who shows good judgment in speech or conduct is described by the adjective discreet. Discreet servants are highly valued. The antithesis of this would be an indiscreet person, one who does not show good judgment about what to say or how to behave. Such poor judgment or the showing of such poor judgment is called an indiscretion. For example, if you told something to your friend in confidence, and later, when a third person talked to him about the same topic, he blabbered your secret, he would have committed an indiscretion. He said something he should not have; he ought to have known better.
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We do not want a government where the ruler decides policy matters and disputes based on his own judgement alone. It is true that some rulers – such as Solomon in the Bible, Caliph Haroun al Rashid or Emperor Akbar, perhaps – may be very wise and may be able to make fair decisions in even very tricky situations, but for one such ruler, there are likely to be many who are foolish or cruel. Justice is too important a matter to be left to the subjective judgment of the current ruler.
If the ideal form of government is that “of laws and not of men”, one realizes that Roman emperor Caligula’s government was the very opposite of it. It was a government “of men” through and through.
Sir William Blackstone (1723-1780), the English jurist and legal philosopher whom you also briefly met in Day 20, holds Caligula as the very opposite – the antithesis – of how fair and just rulers should make laws. He wrote:
“It is incumbent on the promulgators to [notify a new law to the people who are to obey it] in the most public and perspicuous manner; not like Caligula, who . . . wrote his laws in a very small character, and hung them up upon high pillars, the more effectually to ensnare the people.”
Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Law of England
Incumbent
The adjective incumbent means obligatory, required by duty. The word is usually followed by ‘on’ – as in the above quote – or ‘upon.’ If it is incumbent on you to represent your organization at an event, you are duty-bound to do it.
Perspicuous
The adjective perspicuous means clear and easily understandable.
The noun form of the word is perspicuity, which means clarity and ease of understanding.
Blackstone states two requirements for promulgation in the quote above:
- It should be done in as public a manner as possible.
- The notification should be expressed in a manner such that the people to whom the new rule will apply can clearly understand what they should or should not do henceforth.
Corresponding to these two requirements, we can infer that, if the lawmakers are not careful, they can go wrong in two ways with regards to promulgation:
- They may fail to publicize a new law at all.
- If they do make some effort to publicize it, they may fail to truly inform the target population for the new law. This may be because the language in which the notification was written is not familiar to most people in the intended audience or because the notice was shared in a medium that they do not use. For example, a notice written in GRE-level English to announce a new procurement policy for agricultural produce would convey nothing to the rural semi-literate Hindi speaking farmers it impacts. Such a failure to truly inform the relevant public about the new law may be unintentional or deliberate.
A fair legal system would be one that promulgates new laws not only in letter but also in spirit. A law can be said to have been made public only if it actually reaches the minds of its intended audience.
“Laws must be public not only in the sense of actual promulgation but also in the sense of accessibility and intelligibility.”
Jeremy Waldron, The Rule of law, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition)
Intelligible
The adjective intelligible means that which can be understood. Intelligence is our ability to understand things. An intelligent person is one who understands things quickly. So, an intelligible word is one that can be understood. The noun form of the word is intelligibility.
Recall also, from Day 23, what James Madison, a Founding Father of the United States of America and its fourth President, wrote about the importance of accessibility of the legal code:
“It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood . . . Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known . . .?”
James Madison, in The Federalist Papers (No. 62)
How do the modern legal systems fare with respect to Madison’s principle that the laws should not be voluminous and that they should be intelligible?
They fail on both counts.
I will quote from an article critical of the American legal system:
“American citizens cannot study the laws passed by Congress, not because they are unattainably high upon a column but because they are unattainable due to their largesse and legalese. . . the bills and laws are so voluminous they cannot be read and so incomprehensible they cannot be understood. . . How does one know what is in the bill or law, and equally as important, how can one hold a representative accountable, under such circumstances?
. . . [In contrast, the] Judiciary Act of 1789 . . . established the judicial courts of the United States in 21 typed pages. The act establishing a uniform rule of naturalization in 1790 — of no small importance to a young nation of immigrants — took less than two pages of text. . . As the nation grew exponentially through the 19th century, laws were passed accordingly, but even significant legislation like the National Banking Act of 1863 providing for and regulating a national currency took Congress 18 pages to articulate . . . Monumental 20th century reforms like the Social Security Act of 1935 ushered in sweeping change with less than 30 pages of text, and broad-based regulatory statutes like the Clean Air Act of 1963 ran just 10 pages, while its younger cousin, the Clean Water Act of 1972, dribbled on for 88 pages.
The longest law was in 1972 and it was 88 pages. Today . . . they ramble on for thousands of pages. This is a method of operation that must stop.”
Janine Truner, The infamous Roman Emperor Caligula and the U.S. Congress – Washington Times
Articulate
The verb articulate means to express clearly and effectively.
Origin: From ‘article’. An article is an individual thing or object. So, the verb articulate denotes the act of breaking down, verbally, a big or shapeless thing into smaller, distinct articles.
If a person cannot articulate his emotions, this means that he cannot break them down (express them) in clear words. What he conveys or what we sense in him is merely a shapeless mass of confused feelings.
This word can also be used as an adjective. An articulate speaker is one who can express himself clearly. He breaks down his complex idea into smaller points and then talks about one point at a time. He uses language effectively, meaning that he is able to get his idea across to the listeners.
The opposite adjective is inarticulate, which means, not clear; unable to speak clearly. An inarticulate speaker cannot express himself clearly. This may be because he is not fluent in the language or because he has a speech defect or because he does not know how to present his idea in a way that the audience will understand.
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From the Janine Turner quote above, we realize that if new laws passed by the Congress are overwhelmingly huge, it becomes quite difficult for an ordinary American citizen to keep track of the dozens of new public laws that Congress passes every year. But now also consider that in America, the ratio of new rules made by the Congress to those made by the bureaucracy is one to eighteen!
The rules made by the federal agencies are promulgated via publication in the Federal Register, an official periodical in which ALL existing rules and regulations are published, irrespective of whether they are passed by the Congress or by the agencies, whether they are about real estate contracts or about hunting of migratory birds that visit America.
Since 2002, each of the annual print editions of the Federal Register has had more than 70,000 pages! Clearly, it has long been impossible for an individual citizen to know ‘all’ the laws that govern him, though as compared to the print editions, it may arguably be easier now, when the Federal Register is available online on a well-indexed and searchable website, to find the relevant laws on a particular subject.
So, we have learnt that the sheer volume of modern laws is one barrier that prevents the laws promulgated today from reaching the common people. The recondite language in which these laws are formulated is another barrier.
Recondite
The adjective recondite means hard to understand for an average person. The noun form of this word is reconditeness.
Mnemonic: Recondite sounds like the phrase ‘rock in diet.’ Imagine eating a rock. Could you chew it down? No. Could you digest it? No. Well, something – a word perhaps, or a concept or a poem – that is as hard to chew and digest as a ‘rock in diet’ can be described as recondite.
In his 1963 book The Language and the Law, late Professor of Law David Mellinkoff gave one example of how the same law would be much better understood if it was expressed in plain English instead of legalese laden with heavy words that go over most people’s heads.
The GRE being an American test, we have focused mostly on the legal system of America in this discussion, but I believe that what has been said would apply almost as well to other countries. We will wrap up our discussion with a quote from American jurist and lawyer Lee Loevinger:
“It is one of the greatest anomalies of modern times that the law, which exists as a public guide to conduct, has become such a recondite mystery that is incomprehensible to the public and scarcely intelligible to its own votaries.”
Lee Loevinger (Jurimetrics – The Next Step Forward, 1972)
Before you go, here are a few more usage examples of the words you learnt today:
- AI Reporter Karen Hao’s work is focused at demystifying the recondite concepts of Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning.
- Some movies downplay extra-marital affairs as merely sexual indiscretions.
- The pursuit of recondite passions that offer little practical pay-off –such as solving Fermat’s Last Theorem or deciphering an ancient script or studying minute differences between the leaves of different trees in a region – is a luxury that only a few individuals can afford in any society.
- Many critics judge a poem by its reconditeness – the more unintelligible a poem to the common person, the better they say it is. They feel that their praise of a poem that most people cannot even understand automatically marks them out as a person of exceptional intelligence.
- During the debate on whether the biblical proscription on idolatry legitimized iconoclasm, many Christian scholars supported icon veneration by referring to the perspicuity of the icons. They argued that the icons made it much easier for the uneducated masses, who could not read the Bible themselves, to picture the biblical persons and events in their own minds and to understand the deeper ideas conveyed in the book. Viewing is more powerful than hearing.
- The use of visual elements like charts, graphs, and maps helps one make sense of recondite data and see trends, outliers and patterns in the data.
- In the novel Anna Karenina, which is set in the prim and proper aristocratic society of Moscow and St. Petersburg, the eponymous heroine, a married woman and the mother of a ten-year-old son, enters into a very public flirtation with a handsome and unmarried young man, Count Vronsky. After noticing the two in intimate conversation at a society gathering, her husband cautions her that she may “inadvertently, by indiscretion and carelessness, give the world occasion to talk about” her.
- “While we drank our beer, which I had paid for, it was incumbent on him to listen to me and to talk to me.” John Barleycorn, by Jack London
- Prince Salim was so besotted with Anarkali that he promised to make her the queen of Hindustan one day. When emperor Akbar learnt of his son’s indiscretion, he was furious and ordered immediate arrest of Anarkali.
- “When those who are responsible for the leadership of State begin to move in villainous ways; when they begin to destroy the fabric of what it is that our nation is held together with; when they violate the Constitution of our nation and begin to do things that are false to our dreams and our hopes–it is incumbent upon every citizen by right, but also by responsibility, to challenge that administration.” Theodore Roosevelt