Law-makers are...not intelligent

One of the funniest parts of my job is running spell check on large sections of legal code, both Texas and federal. I don't know what the deal is, but evidently normal nouns, verbs, and adjectives aren't enough for these people. My spell checker gets snagged on some really great words. For example: surplusage. This is an actual word, found somewhere in the bowels of the Texas State Business and Commerce Code. Surplusage. What is that? It's "surplus" with a noun ending on it. Like at some point, the codifier was going, "Surplus is a noun...but it's not quite enough of a noun. We need to nounenate it. More noun! It needs to be nounnier!" Other good examples of this that I've found (as Dave Barry says, I'm not making this up): additivity, wharfage, supplementations, peonage.

Sometimes the hilarity comes from a misapplication of endings. Case in point: recordation. Presumably means "the act of making a record" or, what we normal people like to call "recording." "Effectuated," more commonly known as "effected" and "representationor," which is a fun non-word for "representative."

What is this reckless disregard for the rules of English? This is why laws get a bad rap, you know. People can't understand them because THEY'RE NOT WRITTEN IN ANY SORT OF VALID LANGUAGE. Gah!