Beware! The Ides Of March Has Come But It Has Not Passed

Mark Twain said, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” I’ve been mulling over Twain’s words as I sit here at the Commercial Law Juggernaut that is the southwest corner of Atkinson, Conway & Gagnon.

It is appropriate that this topic comes up just before the fateful Ides of March because any number of misfortunes can befall the hapless, gentle businessperson who ends up using the wrong set of words. Like a big unexpected expense, if the gentle businessperson who is selling a few truckloads of logs uses the phrase “FOB” when she meant to say “FAS.” I had a client actually do that once. By chance, I got a look at the contract right before it was to be signed. I was just in the nick of time to explain that “FOB” means “free on board” and that the client had to pay for the cost of loading the logs. This is in contrast to “FAS,” which means “free alongside” and obligates the buyer to pay for the loading. The client was glad there was a Commercial Law Juggernaut backing her up on that day.

There can be any number of ways of saying the same thing, but the words used can give a completely different sense to it. For instance, let’s take the beginning of William Shakespeare’s famous funeral oration from Julius Caesar. In the oration, Mark Antony is eulogizing Caesar, who Brutus and others murdered on the Ides of March (depicted below in a painting by Vincenzo Camuccini).

Shakespeare started the oration this way:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones; So let it be with Caesar.

Contrast Shakespeare's words with those of Beat Generation cult figure Lord Buckley, who re-wrote the passage this way:

Hipsters, flipsters, and finger-poppin’ daddies, Knock me your lobes. I came here to lay Caesar out, Not to hip you to him. The bad jazz that a cat blows, Wails long after he’s cut out. The groovey, the groovey is often stashed With their frames. So don’t put Caesar down. To swing, or not to swing, that is the hang-up!

(That last line is, of course, a take off from a different Shakespeare play, Hamlet. But you can’t expect an inventive mind like Lord Buckley's to always color inside the lines.)

Now Shakespeare -- who Buckley called “Willie the Shake” -- and Buckley were both writing about the exact same thing. The words each chose, however, gave the oration an entirely different tenor. The same thing can happen with commercial contracts. You might mean to say that your obligation to deliver that load of logs is conditioned on the weather allowing you to cut the timber, but it might not come out that way on paper. If you use the almost right word instead of the right one, your contract could excuse you from performing when a plague of lightning bugs descends rather than when unusual lightning and rainstorms occur.

So whether you are a gentle businessperson, or a Roman, or a finger-poppin’ daddy, beware the Ides of March and the opacity of the English language. The jazz a bad contract blows can wail long after the deal has been cut out.

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Brush up on your Shakespeare! You can read all of Willie the Shake’s plays in their entirety on-line: Shakespeare On Line.

Information on the one and only Lord Buckley can be found here: Dig Lord Buckley!

A short biography of Neoclassic painter Vincenzo Camuccini is posted on Wikipedia: Camuccini Bio.