What is a "Fact" in the context of the Declaration of Independence? Jefferson is a clever dude...

 I was just re-reading the article I have previously posted (The Stylistic Artistry of the Declaration of Independence). In this article, there are MANY nuggets of insight into the writing of the Declaration by Jefferson.  Words matter!

The analysis of the word "Fact" is one that made me think today.  This word is found in this line (underline/emphasis mine):

To prove this [the king's tyranny], let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

 

But "fact" had yet another connotation in the eighteenth century. The word derived from the Latin facere, to do. Its earliest meaning in English was "a thing done or performed"--an action or deed. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was used most frequently to denote an evil deed or a crime, a usage still in evidence at the time of the Revolution. In 1769, for example, Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, noted that "accessories after the fact" were "allowed the benefit of clergy in all cases." The Annual Register for 1772 wrote of a thief who was committed to prison for the "fact" of horse stealing. There is no way to know whether Jefferson and the Congress had this sense of "fact" in mind when they adopted the Declaration. Yet regardless of their intentions, for some eighteenth-century readers "facts" many have had a powerful double-edged meaning when applied to George III's actions toward America.19

 Shot fired, Thomas Jefferson!  So, King George III could have read the word "Fact" (emphasized by being capitalized?) to mean what we today would understand the word to mean OR he could have taken it to imply a crime of sorts---OR BOTH!

This is a nice reminder that when reading historical documents it is important to be mindful of every word and the context in which it is used.

 

 

My retirement hobby--Fantasy SCOTUS

Don't, err, "judge" me.  Since retiring in January 2021, I have been an active participant in Fantasy SCOTUS, an online forum for crowd-sourcing predictions of cases argued in the Supreme Court's current term/session.  My handle there is "geneh".

As they say, it is the journey, not the destination with this activity. Over the past year or so I have learned A LOT about how the Court operates through listening to the live arguments, reading the "writs of certiorari" (usually only the abstracts/syllabi---these things are LONG and Detailed!), responses to the writs, Google searches for objective analysis of the cases, and any opinion pieces I can find.   

Listening to the oral arguments is challenging.  The complexity/depth of the arguments from both sides of the case can be very hard to follow.  It is easy to mentally drift when the banter jumps to prior cases/precedents and terms are used that are definitely "inside baseball" between the judges and the advocates.

The best tool for me to understand the oral arguments is a combination of listening to the audio recording AND reading the transcript of the proceeding that is made available shortly after the live presentation.  Those two things would be very time-consuming to do separately, however, there is a YouTube channel that combines the two!

For me, it is helpful to hear and read the arguments at the same time. I can pause the video to Google terms/concepts used in the proceedings that I don't understand. Often that takes me down rabbit holes but the point for me is to keep my brain engaged and to model being a life-long learner.

Here is a video of a case argued this week regarding Social Media and how government officials use their pages for private and/or public purposes.  I highly recommend this YouTube channel for learning purposes.