"Phil Kane" wrote:
in it?" Toscanini replied: "let me see the old score". He looked at
it and said: "there's nothing wrong with this one except that you
need to add another cut -here- and make a change -there-".

(With thanks to the late Meredeth Willson as told in his book
"And There I Stood With My Piccolo")

There's nothing wrong with the language of the USC or CFR if (1) one
has a good command of American English and (2) one has a good
command of law and (3) one understands what the statute/regulation
was intended for in the first place.

The same thing is true of the writings of any technical profession.
I have always felt that an understanding of FCC regulations is as
important to ham radio as an understanding of the technology being
used by the ham.

Isn't it ironic that here we have a thread asking why law isn't
done in "plain English", while we also have other threads going
where several people are twisting the meaning of a regulation
into a pretzel that only a lawyer could appreciate.

With apologies to Toscanini, "there's nothing wrong with this
one except that you need to add another" comment about item 2
"and make a" further comment about item 3.

Item (2) includes finding out what the courts have said the
language means. Dictionary meanings, what the neighbor means,
or what we read on Usenet are all wonderful, but useless if a
court has already decided what it really means.

Item (3) seems to be what everyone is missing in the threads
about whether a now optional requirement exists, because the
*question* is not whether, with the mind set of a twelve year
old, one can distort the language to get what one wants, but
simply a matter of what the regulation was *intended* to do.

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://web.newsguy.com/floyd_davidson
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)