Saturday, December 10, 2011

One from the vault: are turnarounds legitimate?

2 comments:

  1. I'm going to go with the "form is necessary to a point but does not trump making logical sense" camp.

    Also (this is aimed at a certain type of debater see a lot) try not to be an annoying know-it-all about pronunciation. Prima Facie is technically "supposed" to be pronounced "pree-mah fah-kee-ay", but since it has been adopted as an English legal term, it has lost any standardized pronunciation. Most lawyers say "priy-muh fay-shee", but there are a lot of variants. (It's like "llama", which is technically supposed to be pronounced "yah-ma", but nobody says it like that and pointing it out is just irritating.) Feel free to say it however you think is best, but don't be a stickler about it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Definitely; it's just one of many debate-specific, and apparently law-specific too, language conventions.

    Similarly, everybody outside the debate world uses "solvency" to refer to cash flow or a chemical property, but the occasional purist in debate who insists on "effectiveness," or on one occasion I heard "curative power," is just being a pain.

    ReplyDelete