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Welcome to Sesame Street, or whatever.
Today’s lesson is that if you don’t got a good grammar, don’t be writing legal documentations
because these require specificionment.
Exhibit A: Title 26, Chapter 7, Subchapter 3, Section 3, Subsection F of the American
state of Maine’s laws.
Subchapter 3 mainly has to do with overtime work rules in the state—basically, any hours
worked over 40 a week have to be paid at 1.5 times normal hourly pay—but subsection F
contains exemptions to this rule.
Now, let’s play spot the ambiguity: “The overtime provision of this section does not
apply to the canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing
for shipment or distribution of: agricultural produce; meat and fish products; and perishable
foods.”
So, wait, wait, wait.
Is overtime exempted when packing for either shipment or distribution or when packing for
shipment or the distribution of.
If it’s the second, then anyone distributing these things, for example, truck drivers,
would not be granted any overtime!
This sentence is just begging for a good old fashioned American lawsuit.
Now, lexical nuance is tremendously important as single characters can have tremendous consequences.
Here’s approximately three examples.
In the UK, public information on incorporated companies is published by Companies House,
a government agency.
In 2009, Companies House, as they do, published that Taylor and Sons was going bankrupt.
Only problem, Taylor and Sons was a thriving engineering firm that had existed for close
to 150 years and employed over 250 people.
Taylor and Son, on the other hand, a completely different company, was really going bankrupt—it
was just a one letter misspelling.
All of Taylor and Sons customers, though, saw that they were closing up shop and stopped
doing business with them which caused them to actually go bankrupt.
The owner, of course, sued the UK government and reached an undisclosed settlement of probably
millions of dollars in 2016.
The lesson learned?
Have more sons because when it’s a family business it’s not child labor, it’s chores.
Example dos: In 1962, NASA launched Mariner 1—a spacecraft that was going to go say
hi to Venus.
At the time, most NASA computer code was written out by hand and then, once complete, transcribed
into a computer using punch-cards.
Only problem, humans suck and one of the meatbags forgot to enter this tiny overbar when transcribing
the spacecraft’s guidance system.
Now, I’m no doctor, but the internet tells me that the lack of that overbar caused the
spacecraft to overcorrect for velocity variations which led to the spacecraft going wildly off
course which led to NASA giving the Soviets a big, “W,” in the space-race.
Now, NASA’s all about having the public embrace its technology but a few minutes after
launch this spacecraft was on course to give some Americans too close of an embrace.
The guy in charge of the big red button pressed the big red button to make the spacecraft
explode.
If you’re wondering, this meant that it didn’t get to space.
The cost of this transcription mistake?
$150 million.
That’s more than the average American makes in a year.
Example number C. Back in the early days of the United States the government figured out
that it needed money in order to do stuff so it started to impose tariffs on imports.
After the civil war, this problem of needing money to do stuff became even worse—because
of war debts, of course.
Therefore, they updated this document outlining American import tariffs.
One edit was in a section of exemptions one of which was, “fruit, plants tropical and
semi-tropical for the purpose of propagation or cultivation,” meaning fruit could enter
the US tax-free.
This was a mistake.
It was meant to say, “fruit-plants,” as in, the plants on which fruit grows.
The US government tried to enforce the intended meaning of the sentence to which fruit-importers
responded with some lawsuits and in the end, the US government lost and was forced to refund,
adjusted for inflation, about $40 million in tariffs which accounted for almost 0.7%
of the entire national budget.
The lesson learned?
Categorize your fruit as musical instruments in order to get lower import tariffs.
But back to Maine’s modern-day comma snafu.
Oakhurst Dairy is a company based in Portland, Maine that produces and distributes milk which,
based off testing, I can confirm is a perishable good.
Therefore, the company looked at this sentence and figured they didn’t have to pay overtime
while the drivers looked at the very same sentence and figured they did deserve overtime
so five drivers sued the company for their either rightfully or unrightfully deserved
overtime pay.
The drivers and company went to trial and the court said no, the drivers didn’t deserve
overtime pay because look at this sentence—it very clearly lays out an exemption!
The drivers appealed, the case went to an appeals court, and then the judge dropped
this thick 29 page ruling analyzing the single sentence and eloquently saying to the drivers,
“fair point, you win.”
As a result, Oakhurst Dairy had to pay about $5 million in overtime fees.
They did win a partial victory, though, as soon after, Maine dropped a few of these bad
boys into their laws—semicolons.
The good news is that, unlike the grammatical heathens in the rest of the English-speaking
world, most American states now require the use of the Oxford comma in government documents
to cut down on ambiguity.
Now, learning that using only one comma in a list of three is a primitive relic of a
time when we threw buckets of poop out the window is easy.
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