Projo Politics Blog

Pastiche. Aposematic. Pleochroic.

Those are a few of the words that Senior Judge Bruce M. Selya, of the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals, shared last week with the 600,000 or so people who receive the daily e-mail newsletter A.Word.A.Day.

Selya, for years the only Rhode Islander on the Boston-based appeals court, was chosen as last week’s “guest wordsmith” by Wordsmith.org founder Anu Garg.

In April, Garg asked Selya to write a brief introduction discussing how he developed a love of words and to select 10 words that he has used in his rulings. Wordsmith.org then featured five of Selya’s choices.

“My love of language can be traced directly to the Providence public schools and, particularly, to Classical High School — where four years of study in Latin was compulsory and some study of Greek was encouraged,” Selya wrote in his introduction. “I became fascinated with the origin and evolution of words, and the flames of my interest were fanned during my years at Harvard.”

“When I was fortunate enough to receive an appointment to the federal bench, I saw an opportunity to attempt to change the drabness of the prose in which judicial opinions historically have been couched,” Selya wrote. “ ‘Legal language’ tends to be both stiff and prosaic, not to mention dense. Thus, if court opinions can be thought of as word pictures, many opinions over the years can be characterized as word pictures painted in various shades of gray. I thought then — and still believe — that interesting language and sound jurisprudence are not mutually exclusive. My opinions, therefore, tend to be word pictures painted in less somber colors — sometimes even pastels or an occasional touch of puce.”

(Puce, by the way, is another way of saying brownish purple.)

Selya acknowledged that not everyone approves of his writing style. “Judges, by nature and by training, rarely tend to be free spirits, and I have encountered from time to time an undercurrent of anti-lexiphanicism. But like Job, I persevere. Language is the lifeblood of our culture, and it would be a shame not to use it to its fullest.”

(As if you didn’t already know, lexiphanicism is the use of pretentious words, language or style.)

Wednesday’s word was pastiche, which is pronounced “pa-STEESH.” For many Rhode Islanders, that word means one thing: tasty desserts from Federal Hill.

But the formal definition is “An artistic piece, for example a literary, musical or dramatic work, that imitates works of other artists” or “A hodgepodge of incongruous parts taken from various sources.”

Selya used the word when writing a 1988 concurring opinion in the case of Redgrave v. Boston Symphony Orchestra: “The majority’s reading,” Selya wrote, “unduly emphasizes the concurring opinion by two justices, and it engrafts onto the plurality and concurring opinions selected statements from the dissent. Then, to hold this pastiche together, it overrules … well-established Massachusetts law.”

For those with a dictionary handy, here are some of Selya’s other 10 choices: Pettifoggery, sockdolager, haboob.

--By Edward Fitzpatrick, John E. Mulligan and Katherine Gregg

Journal staff writers

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