Spring has sprung, and the annual battle between two big-box home improvement stores is under way.
The stakes are these: Lowe’s and Home Depot both sell a lot of flowering plants, and a lot of gardening paraphenalia. The companies spend big bucks to develop new strains of “exclusive” flowers to appeal to the gardening public.
The Wall Street Journal has the headline of the day for its story on this fight:
“The Garden Gloves Come Off”
John Doe got sued this week.
He must screw up a lot, because he’s always getting sued.
Actually, whenever a lawyer needs to file a claim and isn’t sure quite whom to tag, she’ll file a suit against John Doe, particularly if there’s a statute of limitations about to run.
Once Doe is unmasked during discovery, the lawyer moves to amend and get the right person in the suit. The parties take it from there.
Was there ever a real historical John Doe? Doubtful. “John Doe” is “a fictitious name frequently used to indicate a person for the purpose of argument or illustration,” according to Black’s Law Dictionary.
It turns out John Doe has been used by lawyers as a placeholder name for centuries.
Michael Quinion, who writes on “international English from a British perspective” in the blog “World Wide Words,” says that Blackstone referred to John Doe in his “Commentaries on the laws of England” for 1765-69. And the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary take Doe back a century before that, with a reference in a 1659 document, “To prosecute the suit, to witt John Doe And Richard Roe.”
Ah, let’s not forget Richard Roe. He’s Doe’s sidekick, who shows up almost as often as Doe. He’s Sancho Panza to Doe’s Don Quixote. Sundance to his Butch. Barney Rubble to his Fred Flintstone. Doe and Roe could star in their very own buddy movie.
Think back to when you first met these guys, probably in law school. They appear in any number of legal hypotheticals, and in most of them, Doe always is suing Roe. Here’s hoping Roe takes it like a good No. 2 and has a good defense lawyer.
Even though we can’t place when John Doe was born, we can serve up some genealogy. The practice of creating fictitious persons to make a legal point dates back to Roman times. Roman lawyers had a guy named “Titius.”
Black’s says that “Titius” was “a proper name, frequently used in designating an indefinite or fictitious person, or a person referred to by way of illustration.”
Sounds like our friend John Doe. And for good measure, Titius had his own Richard Roe. The Romans used the name “Seius” as the second banana in their legal hypotheticals.
There actually are people named “John Smith” in the world (go no farther than Jamestown to see the big statue of Capt. John Smith). Anybody named John Doe?
Well, yes, at least one. A few years ago, a New York Times reporter went looking to answer that question and found Mr. Doe in the Upper West Side of New York City.
He is a Korean immigrant who came to the U.S. as a boy in the late 1970s. His name was Jang Do. Doe wanted an American-sounding name, so he changed “Jang” to “John” and persuaded his mom and dad to add an “e” to their surname. (So people would pronounce it like “tae kwon do,” not “hairdo,” he said). Yes, he said he’s heard all the jokes, and no, he said he does not have a wife named “Jane.”
Not explored was whether he had any friends named Roe.
No matter what your view on the controversy surrounding federal funding of National Public Radio, you’ve got to tip your hat to the headline-writers at the Wall Street Journal.
The latest news in the continuing story — NPR President and CEO Vivian Schiller resigned in the wake of the release of a surveillance video in which another, now-departed NPR exec railed against the Republican Party and the Tea Party movement.
The Journal’s headline: “Video Kills the Radio Czar.”
Somewhere the Buggles (whose ”Video Killed the Radio Star” was the first video ever played on MTV, back in 1981) are smiling.
Work product from someone who didn’t proofread his work. Don’t let this happen to you!
Before you can say you have finished writing something, you have to proofread your work. Before you file anything, you have to proofread your work. Make sure you say what you mean.
The other day I got an e-mail message from a colleague who knows I like to tinker with headlines – it was one of those viral collections of “Oh no, did they really publish that?” headlines. The papers that printed the headlines below shall remain nameless. I can say on good authority that none of these appeared in Virginia Lawyers Weekly.
Man Kills Self Before Shooting Wife and Daughter
Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says
Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers
Panda Mating Fails, Veterinarian Takes Over
Miners Refuse to Work After Death
Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant
War Dims Hope for Peace
If Strike Isn’t Settled Quickly, It May Last Awhile
Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures
Red Tape Holds Up New Bridges
Man Struck By Lightning, Faces Battery Charge
New Study of Obesity Looks for Larger Test Group
Kids Make Nutritious Snacks
Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half
Hospitals are Sued by 7 Foot Doctors
Typhoon Rips Through Cemetery, Hundreds Dead
Today is National Punctuation Day.
It’s not one of those made-up holidays that Hallmark concocted to sell greeting cards. It’s a made-up holiday created by a former reporter, Jeff Rubin, who was fed up with commas, and apostrophe’s being put in the wrong place.
2010 marks the seventh annual celebration of the punctuation movement. Last year, they had a bake sale. This year, they are running a haiku contest. Really. The deadline is Sept. 30. The entries, available at the NPD website, include items similar to this one:
Raised by two parens
I’ve been bracketed since youth.
I’m an inside job.
How does one celebrate National Punctuation Day? The owners of NPD (yes, it’s trademarked) suggest going to a bookstore to buy a copy of E.B. White’s The Elements of Style and carefully observing the signs along the way, helpfully correcting those with errors. Then go home and write an error-free letter to a friend.
Good advice, I suppose. You don’t want to be a person who doesn’t know what an apostrophe’s for.
The Virginia Lawyers Weekly editorial team brought home two company-wide editorial awards from the Dolan Media Editorial and Circulation Summit held last week in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Dolan Media Company conducts the Samuel B. Spencer Journalism Awards each year, gathering nominations from its 18 business units publishing 60-some print titles and numerous websites.
The Virginia team won third place in headline writing for a March 2009 story, “Oval and Out: OBX can’t be trademarked.” The piece was a case story about a man’s failed effort to trademark the popular “OBX” tag that appears in oval stickers on cars everywhere on the East Coast. In the words of the headline, he was “oval and out.”
And we brought home the bronze in the creativity category for “The VLW Quick 10,” our popular online feature that debuted last June. “Quick 10″ lists compiled by our editors have included judges’ nicknames, made-up “new lawyer law firms,” Virginia cases about food, lawyer license plates, reasons to strike jurors that stood up and Christmas carols for lawyers, among others. The full name of the award is the “Justice Potter Stewart Freestyle Creativity Award,” named for the late Supreme Court justice who knew pornography “when he saw it.” The Dolan Media judges took the same approach to creativity.
Our colleagues at St. Louis-based Missouri Lawyers Media, publishers of seven titles including Missouri Lawyers Weekly, took home the competition’s top prize as “Best in Show.”
After an endless winter of snow measured in feet and cold, here’s a reflection after a glorious weekend.
Novelist William Styron, a Newport News native, tucked away a love letter to the glories of springtime in the Old Dominion in his Pultizer-prize winning book, “The Confessions of Nat Turner.”
Here’s the passage. In the book, a traveling salesman stops by the farm of Nat’s master, and expounds on the beauty of spring in Virginia:
“No, sir, Mr. Turner,” he was saying, “they is no spring like it in this great land of ours. They is nothing what approaches the full springtide when it hits Virginia. And, sir, they is good reason for this. I have traveled all up and down the seaboard, from the furtherest upper ranges of New England to the hottest part of Georgia, and I know whereof I speak. What makes the Virginia spring surpassing fine? Sir, it is simply this. It is simply that, whereas in more southern climes, the temperature is always so humid that spring comes as no surprise, and whereas in more northerly climes the winter becomes so prolonged that they is no spring at all hardly, but runs smack into summer—why, in Virginia, sir, it is unique! It is ideal! Nature has conspired so that spring comes in a sudden warm rush! Alone in the Virginia latitude, sir, is spring like the embrace of a mother’s arms!”
