Holy Vocabulary Batman!!!

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OK, not to brag but I consider myself a fairly intelligent person. I have both an undergraduate and a graduate degree, I do a lot of reading, and I consider my vocabulary to be greater than the average person. Quite a bit greater actually. I have recently started law school, and I cannot freaking believe that in the first chapter of the first book I opened I discovered two words that I had no idea what they meant in the first 12 pages.

Maybe the only reason I'm doing this is to make myself feel better, but I must ask: does anyone who is not a lawyer know what these two words mean without looking them up? (I already looked them up so I know what they mean now, but I had no clue at the time.)

fiduciary

and

gravamen

So does anyone besides dmc and Chev have any clue about these words? Or is my vocabulary lacking much more than I thought? Perhaps a better question is this how law school is going to be like? Am I going to have to expand my vocabulary on average of 2 words per 12 pages to get through it?

 

I'm stumped

 

Fiduciary - yes - accountants/auditors frequently use the term too.

Gravamen - never even heard of it before.

As far as the vocabulary is concerned - lawyers love to use fancy words that they figure no one else has heard of. They will tell you it is to be percise or some such but we all know it is just an act to impress/confuse their clients.

 

fiduciary -> fidelity -> trust -> strange anglo-saxon law construct no one really understands or tries to understand and is something between an inheritance, work-contract, divorce and a bank account. Or a castle in a remote country that was bought by your grand-grand-grand-pa and put into a family-inheritance allowance that has its on personality! And the castle now serves as vacation residence. Bona fides contract -> a contract that is not formalic, but relies on good sense and the indulgence of the praetor. Or the guy you trusted to do your finance stuff and now is residing on the Bahamas.

gravamen ? One that was burdened with the sentence of a mean judge ? Or somone that mournes the party that lost ?

 

‘Fiduciary’ is a fairly common word. I hear it on the news and see it in newspapers all the time. So I am surprised that someone as worldly as you has not heard of it.

‘Gravamen’ is a much more obscure term. I have a vague idea of what it means which means I must have heard it at some point, maybe on a TV courtroom drama or a John Grisham novel.

 

I don't know what gravamen is, and my understanding of fiduciary is limited to 'fiduciary responsibility', which has to do with managing a trust IIRC.

 

words that i don't know are words that do not exist.

 

You can always learn lots of new stuff on SP.

 

Well... I was as stumped as you are, if that makes you feel any better

 

A fiduciary handles fiduciary responsibilities. I know the term from my accounting days.

Gravamen sounds to me like a fancy term for grave digger but I'm sure that isn't it. I did a Google search and now know what it means I think. Not a word that I will find useful.

 

No clues here. Some people on here are too brainy for their own good

 

www.wikipedia.org

 

With apologies to dmc and other lawyers and lawyers-to-be on the boards...

It's stuff like this which really turns me against lawyers. After all, there are much easier terms that could be used to explain these concepts (well, maybe not fiduciary, that's a more common word which encapsulates a complex concept) but the profession relies on archaic and largely obsolete terms to separate "legal language" from "everyday language". Within that setting, it gives them an extraordinary advantage over a non-professional; I won't go any further because I swore off Foucault a long time ago.

They're not the only profession to do it, but really, is it necessary? Not really. I don't believe that legal professionals do this just to make themselves feel superior - there are concepts in any profession which can only be adequately encapsulated within a word specific to that professional language - but having seen my share of court rooms, the actual execution of law seems secondary to the obsequious forms and language used.

Don't worry about it, Aldeth. Words are words. What matters is how they apply and are useful to you.

 

Non Sequitur, I don't think you can complain about lawyers given that you just used the word 'obsequious' in a sentence.

 

Actually, he used both obsequious and encapsulated. He's just a lawyer-wannabe. And then there's this:

In trouble with the law a lot, are you?

Anyway, like others, I know fiduciary, but not gravamen.

 

@ HB, Splunge,

That was pretty much my point in using those words. I sure as hell don't talk like that in my day job. But when you study criminology and work in an anti-corruption agency, you're around this sort of thing a lot.

Correction: ex-lawyer-wannabe, Splunge! Verily, I have seen that path, and know that it can all too easily lead ever downward into verbosity and anachronism... much like this post...

 

Being Spanish a lingua latina, I could guess that "fiduciary" was something related to trust, and "gravamen" something on the grounds of "making it worse". The exact meanings I did not know... until now.

 

I guess I should be a little more clear here. In both cases, fudiciary and gravamen, I was able to surmise the meaning of the term based on the context in which it was used. I looked it up to verify its meaning, and in both cases I was correct. That's clearly an advantage I had over what I posted, as no one here was given the context in which it was used in, other than saying it was in a law text book. My point was more along the lines of what NonSequitur was making - i.e., words like fudiciary and gravamen are not part of most people's vocabulary, in that I wouldn't have used either of those terms in speaking to someone - at least not before now. Having said that, I see how both terms would be useful to a lawyer.

 

Now, it would be a great achievement to have a graduate degree without having an undergraduate one. Unless there's something in your system that I don't know.

That's normal when you study law.

Every field has its special vocabulary and law doctrine isn't an exception. It's hard to know anything about things like gravamen or anything fiduciary if you haven't had to do with Roman law. But if you take a medical manual, you're surely going to find much more than two new words on twelve pages. At any rate, you don't learn much if you don't even have to expand your vocabulary. Besides, isn't expanding one's vocabulary a good cause on its own?

But on with the sermon:

Fiduciary: Pertaining to the Roman concept of fides. Of course, it has something in common with good faith, but that's not exactly it. Fides is just faith, not good faith. It's somewhat hard to explain but the best term would probably be "external truthfulness." In other words, being true to one's word and maintaining perfect consistency between words (communicates) and actions. Good or bad faith you have when you are convinced your actions are wrong and in violation of the law (bad) or when you are convinced you're in your right (good). Faith, fides, is when you keep an oath and accept responsibility. Romans were renowned for their adherence to oaths, contracts and promises, at least on the formal level. While good faith presupposes a measure of benevolence, there is no such notion in fides. In common Latin, "fiducia" translates as "trust".

Gravamen can have a number of meanings. Firstly, it used to be and perhaps is still used somewhere to describe a means of challenging a bad verdict on the grounds of the judge being an ass. Secondly, it can describe the main part of an accusation or complaint.

 

Well, as chev said, this isnt restricted to law. Any new subject you start to study tries to drown and awe you with fancy new terms for pretty basic concepts. In my opinion this is the sole opinion academic studies tends to be held in high regard by the people who havent pursued them, they hear people fling around fancy words and automatically think academic studies are something realyl really hard. I would even go as far as saying that it is much worse in Swedish than in English, when I picked up a new piece of literature I actually had a harder time understanding it if it was written in Swedish than in English.