Lawyers and judges, being wordsmiths, use "stet" in the same way that normal rational human beings use it: as an imperative verb directing a typist or printsetter to "leave it stand" or "do not delete" or "do not make the correction first marked and then crossed out in this text."

In some jurisdictions, an order directing that things be left as they are is called a "stet" or sometimes a "stet order" in obvious reference to the proofreader's/editor's mark.

In some jurisdictions, a special docket or calendar is maintained by the clerk's office onto which cases are placed to continue them without trial. This sometimes happens in criminal cases where the defendant agrees to do this and not to do that for a period of time, while the case remains unprosecuted on the stet docket, in contemplation of a dismissal or reduction of the charges at the end of the agreed period of time.

When Peter Geier writes, in The Daily Record that "The charges later were dismissed in Baltimore City and stetted in Howard County," the reader must guess at his meaning. A good hunch would be that the charges were "put on hold" pending the execution of some private agreement between the parties, in contemplation of their ultimate dismissal.

The use of the inflected form of stet is generally not a good thing. It tells one almost nothing about what the court in Howard County did but tells you that the newswriter is a barbarian, wears the same pair of underpants for more than one day, slurps soup, and routinely forgets his mother's birthday.