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Part 1 - Language

Read Time: 7 minutes

Before the legal world. Before contracts, statutes, and documents. Before any of it — there was language. It is worth starting here, because everything that follows is made of it.

Before the writing

Fact

For much of human history, there was no writing. Knowledge was spoken — passed between people through story, song, ceremony, and memory. The oral tradition was not a primitive predecessor to literacy. It was a sophisticated system for preserving what mattered. The griots of West Africa could recite genealogies stretching back hundreds of years. The bards of ancient Ireland carried the laws of their people in verse — precisely so the laws could not be quietly altered without someone noticing. The Vedic texts of ancient India were passed down orally for thousands of years before anyone wrote them down, preserved in rhythms and patterns that made errors detectable.

In this world, a person's word was everything. To speak something was to commit to it. To name something was to bring it into being. Language was not merely a tool for communication — it was the medium through which reality was understood, shared, and shaped.

We tend to think of writing as an improvement on speech — more reliable, more permanent, more precise. What did we lose when we moved from a world where your word was your bond, to a world where nothing counts unless it is written down?

The power of naming

Philosophy

Across almost every tradition — religious, philosophical, indigenous — the act of naming is understood as an act of power. In Genesis, one of the first things God does is name things. One of the first things Adam does is name the animals — an act of dominion, of categorisation, of bringing order to the world through language. In ancient Egypt, knowing the true name of something was believed to give power over it. In many indigenous traditions, names are not given lightly — they are chosen carefully, because a name shapes what one becomes.

Fact

Modern linguistics arrived at a similar place through different routes. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis — the idea that the language you speak shapes the thoughts you can think — suggests that naming is not just descriptive, it is constitutive. When you name something, you do not just describe it. You fix it. You give it a category. You make it real in a particular way. And once it is named, it can be governed — because governance requires definition, and definition requires language.

The work of Daniel Everett with the Pirahã tribe of the Amazon provides one of the most striking illustrations of this. The Pirahã language has no numbers — not "one," not "two," not "many." It has no fixed terms for colour beyond light and dark. It has no creation myth, no concept of a distant past, and no way of expressing something that the speaker has not directly witnessed or that someone they know has not directly witnessed. It exists almost entirely in the present. Everett spent decades living among the Pirahã and found that these features of their language were not limitations — they were a worldview. The Pirahã do not think in the categories the language lacks. They do not experience time, quantity, or abstract authority in the way that speakers of European languages do. Their world is genuinely different — shaped by the language they speak, and by the words that exist within it.

Consider what this means for the legal world. Legal language creates categories — person, property, obligation, consent, contract — and once those categories exist in language, they exist in reality. They can be applied. They can be enforced. A person who has no word for "obligation" cannot be bound by one in the same way as a person who has been raised in a world where the concept is woven into the language from birth. The Pirahã would make poor defendants in a contract dispute — not because they lack intelligence, but because the entire conceptual framework of contract law would be, to them, a foreign language in the deepest possible sense.

Observation

Before a child is named, they are a baby, a new arrival, a person without a fixed identity in the written world. The moment a name is given — and registered — they become something specific. A legal entity. A person with a name that can appear on documents, in records, in databases. The name is not just an identifier. It is the beginning of a relationship with the written world. We will return to this in Part 3.

What was named first — you, or the person? And who did the naming?

Grammar and grimoire

Fact

The word grammar — the system of rules governing language — and the word grimoire — a book of spells — share the same root. Both derive from the Old French grammaire, which came from the Latin grammatica, the art of letters. In medieval Europe, literacy was so rare and so associated with the clergy and the learned that the ability to read and write was perceived as a kind of magic. A man who could read was a man who could access power that others could not see or touch. The grimoire — the book of spells — was simply a grammar of a different kind. A system of written words, precisely arranged, intended to produce a real-world effect.

Fact

The word spell carries this double meaning to this day. To spell a word is to arrange its letters correctly. To cast a spell is to use arranged words to produce an effect. The word incantation comes from the Latin incantare — to enchant, to sing into, to chant over. And cant — the specialised language of a particular group — gives us the legal cant, the medical cant, the financial cant. Each profession has its own. Each one is a grammar. Each one is, in its way, a grimoire.

Philosophy

Legal language is a cant. A specialised system of words, precisely arranged, intended to produce specific real-world effects — and largely inaccessible to those who have not been trained in it. When a solicitor drafts a contract, they are doing something functionally similar to what a medieval scribe did when copying a legal document — using a precise grammar to fix an arrangement in writing, in a form that carries authority and produces consequences. The magic is not in the mysticism. It is in the precision. And in the gap between those who understand the precision and those who don't.

If grammar and grimoire share the same root — if spelling and spells are the same word — what is actually happening when a legal document is drafted, signed, and sealed?

The Tower of Babel

Observation

The story of the Tower of Babel describes a world in which all people spoke one language. With that single shared language, the story says, nothing would be impossible for them. The response was to confuse their language — to fragment their ability to communicate, so that they could no longer understand one another and their project collapsed.

Whether you read this literally, metaphorically, or as something else entirely — the underlying observation is worth sitting with. A shared language is a form of power. The fragmentation of language is a form of control. When the language of law is opaque to those it governs, when the language of medicine is inaccessible to patients, when the language of finance is designed to obscure rather than illuminate — the effect is the same as Babel. Division. Confusion. Dependence on those who do understand.

Observation

We live in a world of specialised languages. Legal language. Medical language. Financial language. Political language. Each one carries power for those who understand it and creates dependence for those who don't. The answer is not to learn every specialised language. It is to understand that they are languages — constructed systems, chosen words, arranged deliberately — and that they can be learned, questioned, and navigated by anyone willing to pay attention.

What would change if the language of law were as accessible as everyday speech? Who benefits from the gap between legal language and the language most people speak?

Language shapes reality

Philosophy

Orwell understood this. In 1984, the fictional totalitarian state was working on Newspeak — a language deliberately reduced, year by year, until certain thoughts became literally impossible to think, because the words needed to think them no longer existed. This was not science fiction as fantasy. It was observation as warning. Language does not just describe reality. It shapes what reality is possible to perceive, to articulate, and to act upon.

In the legal world, this operates in a very specific way. The words used in a statute define what the statute covers. The words used in a contract define what the contract requires. Change the words — and you change the reality. This is why legal drafting is so precise, why definitions sections in legislation can run to pages, why a single word changed in a treaty can alter the rights of millions of people. In law, language is not how we talk about the world. Language is the world.

If language shapes reality — and legal language shapes legal reality — what realities have been shaped for you, in language you never read?

Why start here

Philosophy

Everything else in this series is built on language. The written world, the person, public and private, consent, natural law, the game — all of it is made of words. Understanding that words are not neutral, that they are chosen deliberately, that grammar and grimoire share a root, that naming is an act of power — this changes how everything that follows lands.

Without this, the rest of the series is just information. With it, the rest of the series becomes comprehensible in a different way. Not just facts to be absorbed, but a framework to be understood — and navigated.

I came to this through looking at legal documents. Really looking at them — at the words, at what they actually said rather than what I assumed they said. The more carefully I read, the more I noticed. Not just in legal documents. In everything. News. Government announcements. Terms and conditions. The language of institutions. Once you start reading carefully — really carefully — you cannot stop. It changes how you move through the world.

That is, in the end, what this series is for.

When did you last read something — really read it — before you agreed to it? And what might you have missed?

← Navigating the Legal World | Part 1 - Language | Part 2 - The Written World →