I'm Jay Joshi and I'm an entrepreneur and investor based in New York City. In January of 2010, I read On Language in the New York Times Magazine by Ben Zimmer [a column that was the domain of the indomitable William Safire] that gave me the inspiration for my blog title.
In his column, Zimmer describes the plight of Randolph Barnhouse, a lawyer who was arguing a case in front of the Supreme Court in November of 2009. Barnhouse was acting as counsel to a company selling tax-free cigarettes over the Internet.
Barnhouse said the opportunity to recover taxes on the cigarettes was an “inchoate” interest, not yet fully formed. “Any recovery would not be property until it became choate, until there was an amount of money assigned to it,” he explained.
Scalia stopped Barnhouse. “There is no such adjective,” he declared. “I know we have used it, but there is no such adjective as choate. There is inchoate, but the opposite of inchoate is not choate.”
Not willing to let the matter go, Scalia went on, “It’s like gruntled,” noting that some people mistakenly think that the opposite of disgruntled is gruntled. This isn’t the first time that Scalia has publicly assailed choate, Zimmer writes. Back in December 1992, when hearing the oral argument for I.R.S. v. McDermott, he told a hapless lawyer, “You know that there is no such word as choate,” arguing that “choate is to inchoate as sult is to insult.”
Incidentally, choate is pronounced KOH-it or KOH-ate, an adjective defined by Webster’s New World Law Dictionary as “completed or perfected in and of itself” and formed as the opposite of inchoate (“commenced but not completed, partially done”).
Scalia is funny, acerbic and politically incorrect and even though he is perpetually obsessed with constitutional originalism [which strikes me as naive and unrealistic], the story struck a chord. We should all strive for fidelity to the written and spoken word and to learning. If an advocate before the Supreme Court can be corrected for incorrect usage, the rest of us mortals don't stand much of a chance. However, we can try.
Thus, "Choate is Not a Word" became the title of my blog. And because inchoate is indeed a word, I used it in my subtitle "and other Inchoate Observations". If you find anything I've written to be idiotic or incomplete, please remember that you were warned in advance.