Rehnquist’s plight: when lawyers, journalists, and other logophiles hang on your every word

Word of the day: logophile.

I got a kick out of a logophiliac article that begins:

Three sentences. That was all it took for Chief Justice William Rehnquist on Thursday night to calm an entire city by indicating he was not about to announce his retirement. The brief statement instantly reoriented the discussion of Supreme Court vacancies back to the only one that exists . . .

But like any words that emanate from the Supreme Court, Rehnquist’s statement is subject to interpretation. Deprived of rumors on Friday, court watchers soon set about parsing his statement to detect hidden, originalist or even modern “living Constitution” meanings. In other words, what would Justice Antonin Scalia read into the statement, as opposed to what Justice William Brennan Jr. would take from it?

“Parsing Rehnquist’s Retirement Statement,” by Tony Mauro for Legal Times (via Law.com)

The article continues sentence by sentence with “some alternate and whimsical theories about what Rehnquist said.” Read it.

[By the way, when I link to a dictionary definition, it's not to insult your intelligence or vocabulary. It means I paused a moment to find the right word or ensure I used a word properly, and figured someone else might be curious about the precise definition. Having dictionary.com in the search window of my Firefox browser has facilitated my exploration of the language; I always used to be too lazy to look anything up, but now it's always right there. Am becoming a logophile, I guess.]

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