Charter of the United Nations
"WE, THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED
to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and nations large and small, and
to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,
AND FOE THESE ENDS
to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and
to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and
to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all people,
HAVE RESOLVED TO COMBINE OUR EFFORTS TO ACCOMPLISH THESE AIMS.
Accordingly, our respective Governments, through representatives assembled in the city of San Francisco, who have exhibited their full powers found to be in good and due form, have agreed to the present Charter of the United Nations and do hereby establish an international organization to be known as the United Nations."
For detailed treatment of business (the commercial sphere, diplomacy and statesmanship, as well as a number of other particular spheres and types of speech) the reader is advised to consult comprehensive monographs by I.R. Galperin and other well-known specialists in this country: I.V. Arnold, V. A. Kukharenko, A.N. Morokhovsky, and others. The present author's aim, as repeatedly declared above, is not the description of details, nor any attempt to provide learners with ready-made cribs — imaginary universal keys for practical analysis. The aim is to show stylistic problems in a systematic manner, without confusing language levels, as did most of the author's predecessors, that is to say, lexical level and semantic plane, morphemes with phonemes, logical syntax with communicative syntax, strictly differentiating problems of choice (stylistics of units) from problems of combination (stylistics of sequences). The author protests against what is obviously erroneous, especially against classifications which are unscientific, or illogical, or both.
Legal sphere. In many respects, the sphere to be discussed is inseparable from what has just been briefly outlined as Diplomacy and Statesmanship. Perhaps it would have been a more reasonable way to have mentioned Law first, as a generic term: it is clear that Law as the practice of social intercourse and as knowledge of how it is regulated includes International Law (and Diplomacy) as a very significant component, and yet as a logically lesser notion. The only reason why it is included here is that both civil and criminal law concern every citizen much more often than do international affairs. To use the current expression from the cradle to the grave (see The Mask of Anarchy, a poem by Shelley) would appear an understatement, a meiosis. Life in civilized countries is not measured by the period between birth certificate and death certificate only: in most cases it is preceded by the marriage lines of the person's parents and often followed by juridical legacy hunting.
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Discussing the process of jurisprudence, one must not overlook the great difference between what is said in the arguments, in court and what is protocolled. The parties of the former, i.e. the prosecution and the defence, use legal terminology, employ the traditionally accepted formulas. Thus, in the USA, the prosecutor represents the people of the
State in which the session is held; he speaks in the name of the people, and refers to himself (or rather to his position in court) also as the People (the reader will see it in the extract below). In Britain, it is the Queen in whose name the defendant is accused of the crime committed (not the People of Britain!).
Here is an extract from An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, showing the whole of the verbal ritual of a session starting. All the announcements made are practically unchangeable (save, of course, the defendant's name). The extract does not fully reproduce Dreiser's text for lack of space; what is left out is certainly essential for the artistic value of the narrative, but we are interested here only in the verbal standards of the procedure, not as yet in Clyde Griffiths* inner world or in any external events of the moment:
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"And then a voice: "Order in the CourtI His Honor the Court! Everybody please rise!"... And as suddenly the... audience growing completely silent. And then through a door... a man in an ample black gown walked swiftly to the large chair... behind the desk, and... seated himself. Whereupon everyone assembled in the courtroom sat down.
And then to the left, yet below the judge, at a smaller desk, a smaller and older individual standing and calling, "Oyez! Oyez! All persons having business before the honorable, the Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of Cataraqui, draw near and give attention. This court is now in session!"
And after that this same individual again rising and beginning: "The State of New York against Clyde Griffiths." Then Mason, rising and standing before his table, at once announced: "The People are ready." Whereupon Belknap arose, and in a courtly and affable manner stated: "The defendant is ready."
Note. The interjection oyez [ou'jez], or oyes [ou'jes] means 'listen!' and is used as a call for attention (going back to Old French oyez of the same meaning) is uttered (usually thrice) in English-speaking countries by public crier or court officer to bespeak silence and attention.
Readers of detective stories with court session scenes might know that the general routine is violent controversy of the two parties: the prosecutor and the defence. One of the legal tricks often resorted to consists in making the judge reject the question raised or asked by the opposite side, as immaterial, irrelevant, leading (i.e. helping the defendant or the witness to give the desired answer), etc. The judge either upholds the protest as legally motivated or repudiates the protester's motion. In legal terms, the objection is either 'sustained' (i.e. pronounced valid) by the judge, or 'overruled' (which means declared invalid).
A few instances from the same novel:
1. "Now, Mr. Alden, just tell the jury how... it was that your daughter Roberta happened to go to Lycurgus."
"Objected to. Irrelevant, immaterial, incompetent," snapped Belknap.
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2. "Do you think that voice came from where this dot in Moon Cove is?"
(Objected to. Sustained.)
3. "Do you always run away when one of them (girls — Y.S.) dies?"
"Object," yelled Belknap, leaping to his feet. "Objection sustained," called Oberwaltzer sharply.
4. "You had to stand your share of whatever social doings were on foot, didn't you?"
"Objected to as leading!" called Mason.
"Objection sustained," replied Justice Oberwaltzer. The ritualistic sublanguage of Law is peculiar and in most cases archaic: breach of promise, first degree murder, i.e. premeditated; manslaughter, i.e. causing death by chance or without intending to; formulas like the judgment of the Court is that you, Clyde Griffiths, for the murder in the first degree of one Roberta Alden, whereof you are convicted, be, and you are hereby sentenced to the punishment of death... — details follow. In Great Britain, the death sentence ended for centuries in the words to be hanged by his (her) neck till he (she) is dead. After the Second World War capital punishment was abolished in England as in certain other civilized countries: Italy, Federal Republic of Germany. In the USA it is nowadays non-existent in very few states; in most, people are either electrocuted, or hanged, or die in special gas chambers (every execution in America, as far as one can learn from some European books, is watched by whole teams of news-hounds and TV-cameramen). It is widely known that the questionable pleasure of watching the electrocution of the Rosenbergs (accused of and convicted for nuclear espionage) was bestowed on the American viewers as early as 1953. But to return to the problems of stylistics.
As suggested in the section on the Diplomatic Sphere, most oral proceedings dealing with real problems are also in legal matters not quite as subject to ritualistic cliches. More than that: the substance and form of a court session, of interrogation and cross-examination, what points may become controversial between prosecution and defence are unpredictable and sometimes become aggressive or offensive. Being part and parcel of every criminal case, both the Prosecutor's speech and the final speech of the Counsel for the defence are often little concerned with logic of facts or the intricacies of the penal code. What both of them think about is the local political situation, in which either party may at times
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lose by winning, or vice versa. They must know exactly whom they seek to convince. The jury whose credit they are to win are not professional lawyers — just ordinary people, laymen in jurisprudence — God-fearing and law-abiding, but complacently ignorant in both. Twelve men picked out of many by mutual consent of the parties involved, are to come in the end to the verdict of 'Guilty' or 'Not guilty'. It is clear that neither deep psychological insight into the matter, nor strictly legal arguments will move the jury; they are prejudiced and sentimental; what can affect them (for lack of sensational testimony) is perhaps the oratory of the parties opposed: which will do his bit better7 That is why the speeches of both show a strong resemblance in certain places: similar appeals to the jury's ability to see what is true and what is false, the same insinuating manner of address, the same sentimental philosophy of Love.
"Friends, this thing has happened millions of times in this world of ours; and it will happen millions and millions of times in the days to come..."
"For after all love is love, and the ways of passion and the destroying emotion of love in either sex are not those of the ordinary criminal. Only remember we were once all boys. And those of you who are grown women were girls, and know well — oh, how very well — the fevers and aches of youth..."
"But did he even do that? Never by letter! Never.' Oh, no, gentlemen, oh, no!"
"Be sure! Oh, be very sure that no such mistaken judgment based on any local or religious or moral theory of conduct... is permitted to prejudice you... Oh, be sure! Be very, very sure!" It is truly hard to say which is prosecution and which defence. All is sheer rhetoric, having no direct connection with the Legal Sphere discussed in the first half of this section.
Documentation sphere. The word document embraces many kinds of strictly official texts. In popular dictionaries this word is defined as 'thing, deed, writing or inscription that furnishes evidence' (or even 'illustrates human nature'). Obviously, this is too broad for a stylist. Here, the narrow (and best known) sense is meant: official written evidence, a text specially intended to serve as legal confirmation of some evidence.
Some types of documents have already been dealt with: receipts and accounts in commerce, parliamentary bills, acts of law in affairs of state, notes, diplomats' credentials, protocols, etc. These are all documents. Each kind has specific features of its own; their common feature is the use of ready-made expressions, cliches, without which they are hardly imaginable.
The present section deals, so to speak, with the acme (i.e. highest point) of the genre, with what practically consists only of stereotyped (often
7 Скребнев
archaic) constructions, of special lexical units used nowhere except in the documents in question.
The documents meant are identity cards, certificates of all sorts, diplomas, etc. In many cases they are ready-made (printed) texts with blanks to fill in by the user (application forms).
It is here, in this monstrous progeny of our old bureaucracy, that we find the purest samples of 'officialese'. Traditional obsolete forms of expressing simple ideas in a complicated form predominate here. Even in our country after the Revolution, every insignificant certificate (справка) began with the words: Дана настоящая в том, что... Official reports (акты) ran like this: Акт. 1939 года, мая, 17 дня, мы, нижеподписавшиеся....... составили настоящий акт о нижеследующем... The present author's own diploma of 1950 begins with Предъявитель сего тов.....It is known that the demonstrative pronoun сей
was current (evidently as already obsolescent) in the first half of the nineteenth century.
As for American university diplomas, they look even more arehaic than ours. The reader had better make sure himself or herself:
The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York
To all persons to whom these presents may come greetings be it known that
Pearl M.K.
having completed the studies and satisfied the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
has accordingly been admitted to that degree with all the rights and immunities thereunto appertaining in witness whereof we have caused this diploma to be signed by the President of the University and by the Dean of Teachers College and our corporate seal to be hereto affixed in the City of New York on the third day of June in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and thirty one:
Dean President
Hoping that the reader will be able to decipher the general sense of the document and enjoy the dignified beauty of its style, we shall now pass on to the opposite pole of our dichotomy: to the unrestrained, loosely controlled manner of using language, and that rather by instinct than intellect.
NOTES
1 Post E. Etiquette. — New York, 1956. * Galperin I.R. Stylistics. — M., 1971.
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