Word: mumbo
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...breed bitter resentment. "Lawyers have become secular priests," says Fred Button, a White House aide in the Kennedy Administration and now a successful Washington, D.C., attorney. They are, agrees Berkeley Law Dean Sanford Kadish, masters of "a mysterious art form to which the layman is not privy, with mumbo jumbo going on." The heart of the art, of course, is the impenetrable language that lawyers use, sometimes at great length (a direct outgrowth of the English practice of paying lawyers by the word for their briefs, which were, as a result, rarely brief...
Still, the mumbo jumbo can intimidate and irritate the layman. Further resentment stems from the ability of excellent lawyers to muddle and obfuscate. Says Button: "Lawyers are paid to complicate, to keep a dispute alive, to make everything technical." The Washington, D.C., firm of Covington & Burling, for example, once delayed for twelve years a Food and Brug Administration ruling on the labeling of peanut butter jars. Said one Covington lawyer: "Certainly, there's something suspicious about a 24,000-page hearing transcript and close to 75,000 pages of documents on a case involving peanut butter." As Humorist Art Buchwald...
...Case appeared and demanded that their son be "Deprogrammed" and his mind washed free of "all that silly mumbo jumbo" some weird religious group had pumped into it. "He's 37 years old and he's still not married," wailed Mrs. Case. "They've just made a zombie out of him, kneeling down all the time, speaking in a foreign tongue." The son turns out, of course, to be a Catholic priest...
...lines, manages to create a character. But after he spreads some suspicions and turns up a body, the film makers take him off the case. He and his very human rationality are left far behind as the film spirals downward through blood, perversity, communion with the damned and pseudoreligious mumbo jumbo...
...given carte blanche to ask questions. "I had forgotten how carefully scrubbed and polite cadets are," said Tompkins, an Army staff sergeant in the South Pacific in W.W. II. Concluded Flamini: "Some may find it hard to accept West Point's honor code as anything more than elitist mumbo jumbo -but there is something to the place." That "something" and the scandal's scope are the story: edited by Ronald Kriss, an ex-Army specialist third class; written by James Atwater, ex-Korean War lieutenant; and researched by Anne Hopkins, granddaughter of Admiral William S. Sims (Annapolis...