And so the ugly business of protecting his son has completely upended his conception of himself, and with Kofi’s murder and the murders of Kofi’s family members, this grand deception has resulted in a cascading set of tragedies for which he is responsible. He may be friends with a guy like Charlie, who has his connections to New Orleans’s seedier elements, but he is in every way a straight arrow. Before the hit-and-run, his reputation for doing things the right way was unimpeachable. “Part Eight” opens with Michael laying out his shoes, socks, and watch in tidy order, underlining a point that the show has made repeatedly. It is plainly obvious to her that Carlo is guilty of murdering Kofi Jones, and not all the judges in the building can be trusted. Now that she’s been quietly shuttled aside for rehab, the case is back in front of Michael, and she can take some comfort in his peerless reputation for fairness and fastidiousness - as much as those qualities curb the pace of justice more than she’d like.
† Conditionals:A Comprehensive Empirical Analysis, Mouton de Gruyter 2001.Michael Desiato is “the stubborn bastard in Court 14 who insists on putting justice over everything.” Those are the words of Sara LeBlanc, the chief justice, who had the Carlo Baxter case assigned to her courtroom until the police mysteriously pulled her over on DUI charges.
#Your honor if it please the court how to#
Unhappily, they are called upon to express many different sorts of modality, so it is very difficult to learn how to use them properly. In other cases modality may be expressed by particular words in English, for instance, possibly (epistemic modality), wish or hope(optative modality), let's (modality), and so forth.Įnglish also has a very small number of verbs ( can/could, may/might, must, shall/should, will/would) with distinct syntactic properties which are called modal verbs because they are ordinarily used only to express modality. Some languages use distinct inflections of the verb to express particular modalities-for instance, the subjunctive inflections in many European languages may express modality, among many other things. Linguists have had to name many such modalities, because every language has different ways of expressing different shades of meaning. ∗ Optative is a technical term signifying a particular modality which marks a sentence as having some meaning distinct from an ordinary assertion of fact. In these, please is no longer understood by native speakers to be any sort of verb it is merely a "discourse marker" expressing politeness in making a request.
In most contexts the Present-day English equivalent is a simple Please: (It may be that formal addresses to the Queen are prefaced with ‘May it please your Majesty’, but that is not a situation likely to arise for most of us.) It should not be emulated in ordinary speech or writing. The expression is entirely archaic, used nowhere except in the courts and by nobody except lawyers I can think of no other situation in which such extreme deference is called for. I only say what follows if it pleases the Court that I do so.
It expresses a necessary condition for the following consequence clause it is semantically equivalent to In fact, it can also be expressed as a frank if clause: If it please the Court. Įxternally, the formula acts like a condition clause (an if clause or protasis) in a conditional construction of the sort that Declerk and Reed † call a ‘Performative-Q Utterance conditional’. Such optative clauses may stand on their own as independent clauses, as they do in my first two examples. May it please the Court = I hope that it will please the Court. May God strike me dead if I am lying = I hope that God will strike me dead May you be forgiven! = I hope that you will be forgiven. Internally, the inversion of may with its subject ( may it instead of it may) signals that may bears an optative ∗ sense-it expresses a wish or hope. Please itself is cast in the infinitive (non-tensed, non-inflected) form because it is the complement of the modal auxiliary verb may, which is the finite head verb of this clause. It (which refers to the main clause which follows) is its subject and the Court is its object.
In this particular forumula, please is an ordinary transitive verb. The syntax-the part of the meaning which is expressed by the order and relationship of different words-is complex. Pragmatically, May it please the court is an archaic formula expressing the speaker's deference to a presiding judge: an acknowledgment that strictly speaking nothing may occur (and nothing may be omitted) in the courtroom without the judge's permission.
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