Musing about whether a word which has independent meaning to someone, anyone, is actually a "word" reminds me of a joke about a lawyer who lost his Rolex.
A lawyer bought a new luxury vehicle and drove it proudly to work the next day.
As he opened the door to step out, a passing truck tore off his door. Someone called 911 and a police officer arrived moments later. The lawyer was still in a blind rage over the damage to his new vehicle.
The officer surveyed the scene quickly and then gasped "You lawyers are unbelievably materialistic. You've lost your arm and you're worried about your car."
The lawyer looked down in shock. "Where's my Rolex?"
*sigh* i love lawyers, almost as much as politicians and those who sell plastic cheese graters and other ingenious devices door to door in the early hours of my weekends
hehe! but what is Rolex? can you explain it for me. my mother language is not english!
Hello,
Volcano8060, welcome. Nice folk like you are a welcome addition to this forum.
Good people like you, who "hehe" before they understand the punch line.
I bet
tED Remmington is delighted.
Welcome.____________
Rolex is a brand of expensive, Swiss wrist watches.
but what if I don't have a Swiss wrist?
Rolex is a brand of very expensive Swiss watches; here in the US many shallow but rich people wear Rolexes to show they have more money than brains.
Also here in the US it is considered chic to bash lawyers, without whom our society could not function. They are the ones who ensure that we live together as peaceably as we do by helping to formulate and enforce laws that benefit all of us. They are the ones who help us transfer real property from one person to another without having to worry about being taken because the seller already sold the same land the day before. They are the ones who defend us when we have been charged with a crime. They are the ones who help us get relief when we have been harmed by another.
True, lawyers tend to speak and write to one another in ways that we lay people can't readily understand, but most of us cannot understand what's going on when two theoretical mathematicians get together. Personally I don't care if they are talking in Farsi or tagalog as long as they get results and as long as they can communcate with me in English.
People here make jokes about lawyers who chase ambulances to find clients. While this doesn't really happen, lawyers do sometimes contact people who have been injured and offer to represent them. What I'd like to point out though is that it is the greed of the victim which then takes over. Lawyers don't manufacture lawsuits, they simply represent those people who do want to sue someone.
Here in the US we have what are called trial lawyers or personal injury lawyers. These people typically receive their pay as a percentage of what they recover for their clients. That means if the client loses so does the attorney. So what this means is that trial lawyers tend to turn down cases that are not winnable. This is actually beneficiary to our judicial system since it cuts down on the number of frivolous lawsuits clogging up our court system. On the other side of that coin you will find lawyers who will threaten a lawsuit in an attempt to get a settlement even when they know the case is very weak. This is contemptible, and is driven perhaps equally by the greed of the plaintiff and the attorney.
I for one happen to like lawyers. Heck, I sleep with mine!
thank you, TEd. well said.
The best lawyer jokes I've heard have always been told to me by lawyer friends ...
A friend of mine, who is an experienced and well-known (and successful) trial lawyer in New Zealand, once said to me (after a few beers and before quite a few more): "Good lawyers make lousy politicians. Bad lawyers generally make good politicians, because they're dumb and therefore not so dangerous. If I see a lawyer who is any good starting to have political wet dreams I'm always tempted to loosen the wheel nuts on his car."
There are altogether too many lawyers in most western legislatures. Given what my friend said, the only way to distinguish the good lawyer-turned-politician from the bad is to find out how good or bad he or she was at the law.
Now, where's my wheel brace?
Hi, volcano. What is your mother language? Rolex is not an English word, is it?
Volcano, goodbuddy,
a lawyer is an it that stinks
() May God has mercy on their Godforsaken souls. ()
Never heard that one before. Among my favorites, which I related to my children is the one that opens, "What do you call 100 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?"
I have to be careful, though. My youngest who is 11 wrote a letter to Yale a few years ago asking them to consider her for admission because she wants to take Sandra Day O'Connor's place on the bench - and they better get back to her soon because she's writing to Harvard too. I considered mailing this for a while, but I can't bear to part with it. Every time I pull it out I laugh myself to tears.
Anyway, possibly because of my continual nasty remarks about lawyers she's recently begun to question whether she should go into law, "because everyone hates them." (Well, daddy hates them and besides, mommy REALLY wants her to be a doctor.) So we had a long talk - several of them, actually. And I think I've convinced her that the highest priority in choosing a vocation is choosing something that one loves doing, regardless of what anyone else thinks about it. "Do what you like to do and do it as good as you can." So now she's agreed to keep an open mind.
"What's your job from now through high school?"
"To find out what I really like to do."
I'm only elated she has so far expressed no interest in psychology.
k
Just one lawyer joke....just one, I promise.
What do you have when you've buried 100 lawyers up to their necks in sand?
not enough sand
I'm only elated she has so far expressed no interest in psychology.
I take absolute umbridge at this. I am currently studying forensic psychology and have made personal assertions not to become another 'raving psychologist.
Previous to this i worked as an embalmer for 6 years, so i know exactly what it's like to do a job that everyone hates in position where people respond to you like you have two heads and yet never once have i considered becoming lawyer, even after studying commercial law for two years.
"Just one lawyer joke....just one, I promise" I presume, Coffebean, that you meant I joke per poster...
Question: What is a Lawyer?
Answer: The larval stage of a politician. ___________________________________________________ Sad 
but true
A good friend of mine who was a personal injury lawyer remarked to me once, "90% of the law is nothing more than horse trading."
It's odd this thing about lawyers in the U.S. In Québec, being a lawyer is an honourable profession to be in, and lawyers are respected like any other professional.
Why is it that they are so vilified in the U.S.?
In reply to:
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
Since those words were written by an Englishman around 400 years ago, the US attitude seems to be merely a continuation of that long-held Anglo-Saxon opinion.
Why is it that they are so vilified in the U.S.?
Oh, they're vilified the world over. The others are just too polite to talk about it.
>Why is it that they are so vilified in the U.S.?
It could be connected with the number of them there. No country in the world is more litigious than than the U.S., and the U.S. breeds lawyers faster than Brazil breeds great soccer players. With at least 60,000 new lawyers graduating annually in the States, that's a whole lot of targets for scorn and contempt.
TEd's passionate defence of the profession notwithstanding, in a country that lives to sue, and with myriads of lawyers who must sue to live, the depth of the anti-lawyer sentiment in the States seems unsurprising.
I also wonder if there isn't a significant component of self-loathing in that anti-lawyer sentiment. Perhaps there would n't be so many greedy, unscrupulous, manipulative lawyers if there weren't so many greedy, unscrupulous, manipulative clients. I actually quite enjoyed Grisham's King of torts for its examination of this side of legal ethics (or the lack thereof).
Finally, just to provide another target for spleen, a friend who spent his entire working life in the oil industry (another increasingly reviled sector) told me recently that the only professional group he views with universal distrust and disgust is real estate vendors. He said that in 35 years, in both the US and here, he has yet to deal with a vendor with ethics.
re Why is it that they are so vilified in the U.S.? ... Oh, they're vilified the world over.
All over, and in all centuries it would seem.
Here is a famous quotation which I always knew as "Why does a hearse horse snicker hauling a lawyer's bones?"
QUOTATION: Why is there always a secret singing when a lawyer cashes in? Why does a hearse horse snicker hauling a lawyer away?
ATTRIBUTION: Quoted in NY Times 13 Jan 85
Source:
Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations, compiled by James B. Simpson. 1988.
I sleep with my lawyer, too. She's a wonderful wife. And my mom slept with her lawyer. He was a great Dad. But still we tell the old one:
Me (to my daughter): Sweetie, what's your mommy do for a living?
Kid: Oh, she's an attorney.
Me: Honest?
Kid: No, the regular kind.
I have two favourite lawyer jokes. Can't distinguish between 'em when it comes to laughs. Here's one:
Pope John Paul dies and with very little further ado finds himself in Heaven, waiting in a short queue for St Peter to escort him to his Heavenly home. In due course, St Pete turns up in a vehicle that looks like a cross between a tour bus and a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost, but with a kicker: It can fly. He invites the four people waiting in the queue to board, and they clamber on. John Paul is feeling really good, because all of a sudden he can move freely again; no aches and pains and he seemed to have regained his youthful vigour.
The RR bus takes off and heads out across Heaven. Within 20 minutes, it had dropped off everyone but John Paul and one other passenger at houses that looked like those typically owned by prosperous professionals: large multi-storey bungalows with swimming pools set in woods full of deer but with no predators. Think of the Sopranos' house in Jersey. In each case the recently deceased was met by relatives and friends in joyful reunions. JP was deeply touched and satisfied by this. Truly, you had your reward in Heaven. He could hardly wait.
Then the RR bus started travelling across much richer pickings: large estates, really fancy houses (think Posh and Mr Spice's Beckingham Palace), servants, stables, biz jets and helicopters on private airfields: You name it. Eventually it put down at a place on a hill that appeared to be an exact replica of a Rhenish castle. It had massive limestone walls, fanciful turrets on fantastically-ornamented towers with stained glass windows and orange-tiled rooves. It even had a moat. Two lines of people wearing livery formed a guard of honour at the point that the RR bus was to touch down and a group of people waiting to greet the new owner milled about. JP started to get up, but then he realised that he didn't know any of the group of people waiting by the landing spot. This one clearly wasn't for him. His fellow passenger, tears in his eyes, got out of the bus and was greeted loudly and joyfully by the party and the guard of honour bowed low as he descended from the RR bus. The sound of champagne corks popping was to be heard just as the RR bus doors shut again.
The shuttle took off again with JP in a state of high excitement. What was his reward to be? It must be something extra special. His reverie was such that he didn't notice that the quality of the accommodation that the RR bus was passing over was deteriorating a bit. In fact, quite a lot. It was only when the RR bus started to descend again that he took any real notice of his surroundings and the first harbingers of disappointment began to set in. That he was right to worry was confimed when the RR bus finally set down in a street which wasn't really all that, um, nice. Kids in rags chased each other around, shouting and swearing at each other. Women wearing curlers leaned in doorways which opened directly on to the street, smoking and shouting at each other across the hubbub created by the children. Men stood on the corner of the street drinking out of bottles wrapped in brown paper bags and watching the bus descend with suspicion. The houses were delapidated terraces, grimy and uncared for, windows boarded up in some cases, dirty in all. The bus door opened, and through it JP could see what was undoubtedly to be his Eternal Home: It had "Welcome, John Paul!" written in crayon on a piece of cardboard fixed to the door with drawing pins.
He tried to swallow his bitterness, reflecting that God always did the right thing and that he must somehow have deserved this fate. He was going to leave uncomplainingly, but found he couldn't quite managed to suppress his disappointment.
"St Peter," he said to the archangel at the wheel, "I accept that the Lord giveth and taketh away. I know that I have sinned from time to time, but by and large I have always tried to do the right thing and to encourage others to do so, too. What have I done which is so bad that I rate this hovel when that last passenger received a castle and servants?"
"Well, Your Holiness," St Peter said, "Popes up here are a dime a dozen. But that last chappie was the first lawyer we have ever had in through the Pearly Gates!"
>>in a country that lives to sue, and with myriads of lawyers who must sue to live, the depth of the anti-lawyer sentiment in the States seems unsurprising.
Funny how there are often different mind-sets depending on where you live. If you ask anybody here about the U.S. people and their great need to sue, no-one will ever blame/discuss the lawyers. It is usually the people doing the suing that get the eye-roll. The lawyers are only doing a job that they were hired to do.