Tantamount to travesty

Knowledge can perhaps be broken down, at its core, into two fundamental elements: (i) the conceptual aspect which is the foundation upon which it is built; and (ii) the medium through which it is relayed.

While it may suffice, for the sake of personal consumption, that one focus solely on the internalisation of knowledge through appreciation of the conceptual aspect, the propagators of knowledge must be adept masters of the medium, save which an injustice is bound to be committed to their consumers.

The medium of which I speak, in case it was so far unclear, is language. The nature of the concept depends on the discipline. Opinions sway politics and philosophy, while in the world of hard sciences, facts reign supreme. But the commonality for every discipline, in fact each atomic denomination of knowledge, is that its proliferation is contingent on its ability to be effectively communicated. Hence, the indispensability of the medium.

My grievances towards the pillage of linguistics in Pakistan in the bureaucracy, politics, academia and unfortunately innumerable other disciplines and spheres are innumerable. But this article shall focus on a single error committed by our most respected judiciary which haunts me more than I would care to admit.

Judgments of the honourable courts are penned down and exist to deliver justice and develop the law. Both are daunting tasks that require not only that said judgments be accurate and precise for the clarification of sometimes complex legal issues, but also that they retain a form that permits their consumption by the masses. This may arguably place the judiciary as the most significant arbiter of linguistic clarity owing to its role as the interpreter of words that determine the rights and responsibilities of all. In this context, errors can be ill-afforded on occasion, never in perpetuity.

Owing to a lack of space, I will further confine my focus to the (mis)usage of a single word: ‘tantamount’. And to the atrocious form, it should never be permitted to take ‘tantamounts’. For reference, dear reader, even as I type this piece out on Microsoft Word, the latter form invites the unprejudiced wrath of the red underline.

I have attempted, first, to trace the origins of this error – though I must seek your forgiveness in case I am found guilty of attributing the original sin to the wrong author. The earliest occasion of such usage in legal parlance appears to be traceable to the Subcontinent. However, to a petty and inexplicable degree of relief, the introduction of the error appears attributable to a Justice Edward Hamilton Wallace who presided as a judge of the Madras High Court during colonial times. Only much later did our esteemed judges, in a fashion that is typical of faith-based precedential reliance, find themselves following suit. This was in 1968. Unfortunately, however, the error has been repeated persistently since then and as recently as the year we currently find ourselves in.

To definitively make my point and to not bore the reader more than is necessary, I would like to now very briefly discuss the etymology of the word ‘tantamount’. The origins are rooted either in the Anglo-French phrase tant amunter or the Italian phrase tanto montare. While the majority of sources lean towards the former, we need not decode this aspect of the dispute since both phrases translate to mean ‘to amount to as much’.

This humble word is categorised, across the board, as an adjective and not, I repeat, not a verb. For this reason, there appears to be no grammatical or linguistic justification to state that one ‘tantamounts to’ another; as far too often our learned judges tend to. Rather, one thing ‘is tantamount to’ the other. Perhaps the confusion first arose from a misguided belief of its interchangeable use with the word ‘amount’, which can in fact be employed as a verb to say that something ‘amounts to’ something else. Needless to say, the confusion remains inexcusable because in law far too much often turns on the interpretation of even smaller words than this.

Apart from fundamentally flawed usage, further disservice has been done in the process. There is a negative connotation to the word ‘tantamount’ which has been lost in the erroneous treatment to which it has been subjected.

Perhaps we would never have encountered this error if more legal professionals were attuned to reading beyond their mandatory hardcovers. But as things stand, this appears to be an extraordinary expectation. But I would, therefore, pray most respectfully that if this author’s feeble attempt at righting a wrong can be appreciated, that (sans the ascription of any credit) any reader in a position to do so cease to misuse a defenceless word and accept this humbly suggested remedial measure from this day forth.

The writer is an advocate of the high courts.