New Year, New Commitment & A Supreme Court Vocabulary Lesson

Talk about taking a hiatus! A fun word in and of itself, from Latin hiare literally meaning "gape." Given the gaping maw between this post and my last, this blog had basically flat-lined. But 'tis January, the month of Janus, the two-faced deity who looks both forward and backward, the god of gateways and doorways, of beginnings and endings. It's the season of resolutions and so mine is to revive my blog and reimmerse myself in the joys of both word-play and writing.

I was reminded of the pleasures of the playground of vocabulary by a fine little item in today's Washington Post, encapsulating an amusing exchange in the hallowed chamber of the Supreme Court, not of legal repartee, but of verbal badinage. Richard D. Friedman, a University of Michigan law professor testifying to the court in the case of Briscoe v. Virginia, piqued the justices' interest with his use of a 10-dollar term in his response to a question from Justice Kennedy. Friedman "added that it was 'entirely orthogonal' to the argument he was making" in the case. As the Post article continued:

Friedman attempted to move on, but Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. stopped him.

"I'm sorry," Roberts said. "Entirely what?"

"Orthogonal," Friedman repeated, and then defined the word: "Right angle. Unrelated. Irrelevant."

"Oh," Roberts replied.

Scalia then jumped in:

"What was that adjective?" Scalia asked Monday. "I liked that."

"Orthogonal," Friedman said.

"Orthogonal," Roberts said.

"Orthogonal," Scalia said. "Ooh."

I'm tickled to point out that as of 10:30 p.m. ET on the day this article ran as something of a sidebar to the main article about the hearing of the case at hand, the Post web site had logged 29 comments on this vocabulary story. The main article? 14.