We meet in the middle, then :-)
I will join you in eschewing, excoriating, polemicizing into a quivering mass of rancid Jello:
most any case ~ where dishonest application of (once) meaningful words is lawyered into an abomination. Offhand though: I can't think of a single nameable 'group' - wherein the murder of language is not at least occasionally tolerated, as the essential means for advancement, leaving us with the cognitive dissonance -
The person you *want* for President ought to be .. only someone dragged kicking and screaming - like GW (no, not That GW: Washington.)
Pledges / oaths may not be coerced however; a coerced oath is invalid on its face - the core of the inanity of the McCarthy era and its demand for such, merely to work / eat.
In marketing/bizness: the murder of language is the explicit means to the end of selling the unnecessary to the weak-willed. What more need be said? Let their extinction be accelerated.
{sigh}
But back to Amendment in same spirit: it's the duty of the Judge to ferret out* the frivolous, duplicitous and just plain obscenely obtuse 'claim' and apply suitable decision.
* I misplaced link to that Wonderful case involving a 'maritime' claim of stunning duplicity: the Judge said so in pure Monty Pythonese. That is how it should be.
I don't think that any number of micro-laws can make it possible for dumb people to judge well; believe also that the wiser Judge needs the least number of laws. This will never approach being a 'science': we have to settle for it's being an art - and take our chances. Improve those by educating away from dumbth and towards a 'liberal education' (what that has always connoted) + discrimination to choose the better - between the old and the newly proposed. More we cannot 'do' IMhO. (I've never heard the phrase, a conservative education. You?)
Sorry - back to 2001. Fat chance: language has Anthrax.
Ashton
whose mistrust knows no bounds, while I remain in mere human form.
