Many legal agonistes like “attorney general,” “surgeon general,” and “court martial” (pl. courts martial) come from Law French, the language of the English courts after the Norman Conquest. Normans, being Frenchmen after all, used both Old French and Old English (and sometimes Latin) in the common law courts that developed after 1066. Hence we have such nonsense legalistic redundancies as “rest, residue and remainder,” “free and clear,” and even “last will and testament.”

Agonstes include my favorite: the “negative pregnant.” It’s a negative (usually a denial) that is pregnant with meaning. Example: Plaintiff alleges Defendant "misused more than a hundred thousand dollars entrusted to him.” The Defendant denies this. Thus, the defendant did not deny the misuse, just the amount. A contemporary example might be “I did not have sex with that woman.”

Stuart Showalter