Friends Don't Let Friends...

...Use legalese as a substitute for actual humor. I've been guarding against this since I first came to law school, and the effects still worry me. Sure, it's nice to laugh and be silly, and I'm not one to be all haughty and supercillious about what I'll stoop to laughing at. So the first time I went to A8 China and a fellow law student asked if the wontons were "Wanton and willful," yeah, I laughed. And I'll admit, a well-placed bit of legal jargon can be undeniably funny. But use of legalese and legal puns on a regular basis is unacceptable.

So today when I sent out my response to an assignment for Sentencing class, I really had to check myself. I was describing a cognitive error known as the "Anchoring Effect" in the process of sentencing by way of a personal example -- using my first doctor's diagnosis of my stomach condition as acid reflux and prescribing medications to treat that condition as an "anchor" that prevented him from considering other possible conditions and medications, even when all the acid reflux medications failed miserably to treat my problem. The assignment asked us to suggest a solution, and I indicated that I no longer thought my problem was acid reflux, and instead concluded that, despite all indications to the contrary, it was a tapeworm, and needed to be eliminated by way of a flamethrower.

After suggesting this, I realized that this alternative would qualify as a different cognitive error we read about -- an "Illusory Correlation." So when I finished my assignment, I originally included a sentence indicating that my alternative would effectively take me away from the Anchoring Effect and into the realm of an Illusory Correlation. I thought this was clever. No, scratch that, the law student in me thought that was clever. The human being in me knew that this was blatantly retarded and corny, and was far beneath my actual humor capacity. So I deleted the line and sent it off.

Apparently I'm not as immune to this problem as I thought, but at least I had the good sense to curb the impulse. But I bet someone reading my response will come up with the same stupid joke I did, and if we end up discussing our responses at class, I half expect someone to utter it. Then, with the appropriate air of self-righteousness, I can look down upon the idiot in question with a mix of derision and pity, and backhand them in the mouth.

Please, friends - - don't be that guy.