26 A Preliminary Diction Study signify a parcel of the world that created it. Language history and its more back-reaching evolution showed how a word is really, quite literally, the incarnation of a speaking community’s valued experience. So that conversely, if an idea or a concept is not as consequential to a collective speaking consciousness, they will not bother to create a word for it. So that the massive cloud of words that blanket our speaking population is more than just a representation of who we are, of what we think, and of how we comprehend the world. In fact, Edward Sapir could not have stated it any better when he surmised that “It is difficult to see adequately the functions of language, because it is so deeply rooted in the whole of human behavior that it may be suspected that there is little in the functional side of our conscious behavior in which language does not play a part” (Sapir 11). In truth, in the past 25 years, the study of language has expanded dramatically, so that its findings are now of value not only to linguists, but to psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, anthropologists, teachers and others who have more concretely realized that language permeates all segments and domains of the human existence. (Downes 275-323). Language is so intimately interwoven with the speakers of a society within which it is tongue, and the different interplays of social factors are inevitably represented if not reflected in their speech. So that to study language and observe it as a social phenomenon becomes a very revealing technique of uncovering the different conflicting values, power tensions, ideological clashes and battling sensibilities that use words as containers for acceptance and resistance. This reality-creating utility and power of the word cannot be more highlighted and illustrated than in the black letter of the law. Our laws, the texts to which we perpetually hark back to distinguish legally right from legally wrong, right from privilege, duty from optional initiative, are all words. The law is said to perpetually succeed reality, as the instrument that preserves it, and embodies it in black and white. The law reflects reality, and institutionalizes it. The black letters embody the whole systemic value judgments and collective sensibilities of a given society. So that in order to study the law in relation to its task as the singular reference of collective values, one must employ not only a framework that studies discourse, but also that which studies social practices. Legislative writing, or the act of drafting laws, has acquired a certain degree of notoriety rarely equaled by any other variety of English. It has long been criticized for its obscure expressions and tortuous syntax, meaningless repetitions and archaisms. To the language scholars, these