I just came across some correspondence with Bryan Garner from 1993, who is by now a well known expert on legal writing, style, and related matters. (His books include his first book, A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage, and many others, such as Garner’s Modern English Usage, Black’s Law Dictionary, The Elements of Legal Style, etc.) I met Bryan when he conducted a legal writing seminar for new lawyers in my firm, Jackson Walker, in 1992, shortly after he founded is firm Lawprose. I corresponded with him a bit, in part about my upcoming article “A Civil Law to Common Law Dictionary,” La. L. Rev. 54 (1994), which I later turned into a book, Louisiana Civil Law Dictionary (2011).
When we met, I believe we discussed how there is redundancy in language, e.g., how you write on a check “$100” and “One hundred and no/100 dollars.” Some criticize this, but there is a reason for this redundancy. In my letter I noted:
I mentioned to you the late Petr Beckmann’ s theory of redundancy in language. Beckmann was a professor emeritus of electrical engineering at the University of Colorado, and passed away in August this year. He escaped from Czechoslovakia after WWII, and taught EE [electrical engineering] and wrote for a long time. He published for about 25 years a wonderful little newsletter, Access to Energy, and also published The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear, A History of π, Einstein Plus Two, and also, The Structure of Language. This last book contains the theory I mentioned to you. In the last issue (August ’93) of the newsletter that he published, he discussed this theory, and I enclose a copy of this for you. He showed that the redundancies in language are not without sense, that they act as error-correcting and ‑detecting codes. That is the point I was trying to make about saying “$100.00” instead of “$100” only; perhaps the chance of detecting or even correcting an error is increased if redundant information is added.
I had long been an admirer of Beckmann. 1 I found his book, The Structure of Language: A New Approach (1972) online (Amazon; archive.org), as well as the final issue of Access to Energy, Vol. 20, No. 12 (Aug. 1993), 2 which contains the short article I had in mind. The text (it’s short) is below:
So what’s there left to write about for an editor who has been hanging around hospitals instead of doing his homework?
Codes and languages.
Suppose I am using binary code (all zeros and ones) in groups of three:
001, 010, 011, 011, 100, etc. What message this might code is of no interest here. In a perfect world, the groups would all arrive the way they were sent. In reality, channel noise will distort some of the 1s into 0s and some of the 0s into 1s. To protect myself against this, I will count the number of 1s in a group of information digits and add a check digit by the following arbitrary rule: if the number of 1s is even, I add another 1 as a check digit, otherwise 1 add a 0. Thus (the hyphen is not transmitted, just inserted here for clarity) my groups become 001-0, 010-0, 011-1, 100-0, etc.
If now the receiver gets a group 011-0, he does not know what went wrong, but he knows that something went wrong, for such a group does not exist. He can request that the group be repeated, all of which can, of course, be easily automated.
The example above is that of an error-detecting code. By adding more check digits per information digit, the receiver can be told which of the digits is wrong. This is an error-correcting code.
There are thousands of error correcting codes around, not necessarily for binary codes. For example, librarians are fond of reversing the order of digits in a book number, so the Library of Congress numbers protect the number against that kind of distortion.
All of these methods have certain traits in common:
1) The message or number contains the actual information digits to be transmitted;
2) a rather arbitrary and artificial criterion is set up (such as whether the number of 1s is even);
3) depending on the fulfillment or non-fulfillment of the criterion, check digits are added to the information digits to protect them from distortion.
- Dr. Petr Beckmann: “Defending Nuclear Power”; Beckmann’s Economics as if Some People Mattered, or, Small is Not Beautiful; KOL058 | Guest on Gene Basler Show: Anarcho-capitalist issues (2010); Carson: Libertarians for Junk Science; Physicist Howard Hayden’s one-letter disproof of global warming claims. [↩]
- See his poignant parting note, “Goodbye, dear readers“; he was on his deathbed, succumbing to cancer: “Dear readers, I would like to take leave of you with the words of a great Czech, Jan Hus, a religious reformer 100 years before Luther. He voluntarily went to defend his views before the Ecclesiastic Council in Constance (on the border of Germany and Switzerland), but the Council condemned him as an heretic and he was burned at the stake on 6th July 1415. In his last letter from his dungeon in Constance sent to his people (“via a good German”) he wrote: ‘Love the truth and be generous in letting everybody benefit from the truth!'” [↩]
