Helping Lawyers with Their Prose By Jon N. Hall President Trump wants to forge new trade agreements with other nations. He also wants to end the nearly 70-year conflict with North Korea and get a peace treaty. But what are treaties, trade pacts, and contracts if not language? Let’s hope the lawyers drafting such documents understand the conjunction “and/or.” In the third edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1998), the entry for “and/or” reads: “First recorded in the mid-19c. in legal contexts, and still employed from time to time in legal documents, and/or verges on the inelegant when used in general writing.” On page 93 of Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1989), the entry for “and/or” presents an excellent little history of the term which lawyers should read: “ And/or thus began in a cloud of legal ambiguity, but such an inauspicious infancy proved no deterrent in its use.” The entry also alleges that “the interpretation of and/or became a matter of litigati...