Education Quote by Frederick Pollock

Legal language loves to dress itself up as clarity, but Pollock is pointing at its most reliable magic trick: every attempt to pin meaning down creates fresh room for argument. The line lands because it skewers a certain educated self-confidence. “Learned persons” suggests the academic and professional class who believe that if you just refine the vocabulary - introduce the right term, draft the perfect definition - you can tame messy reality. Pollock, a judge steeped in case law’s daily grind, knows better. Definitions don’t end disputes; they relocate them.

His phrasing is elegantly prosecutorial. “Odd” is a mild word doing heavy work, a polite eyebrow raise that masks a sharper charge: smart people keep repeating the same mistake. “Apt to” is equally judicial: not absolute, but probabilistic, grounded in experience rather than theory. The subtext is institutional. In courts, parties don’t fight over the “big” ideals; they fight over the boundary lines that new words create. Coin a term and you’ve invented a new perimeter to patrol. Define it and you’ve supplied litigants with handles to grab, twist, and weaponize.

Context matters. Pollock lived through an era of rapid modernization in British law and political economy, when industrial society demanded new regulatory categories. Every new statute, every reform-minded definition, promised order. Pollock’s warning is that law isn’t a dictionary; it’s a battlefield where language is the terrain. The more precise you try to be, the more places there are to contest you.