February 5, 2008
A Tribute to Judge Selya from a Former Clerk
A former clerk to Judge Selya, a senior judge on the First Circuit with a penchant for using neglected words, penned this tribute to his judge (and his judge’s vocabulary) recently in the National Law Journal. In one brief anecdote (my favorite from the article), the clerk recounts how he managed to work “crapulous,” a word he gleaned from a page-a-day calendar, into an opinion. Crapulous means suffering from excess food or drink, making the word a bit trickier to place than one might initially think (since decorum and proper usage would preclude simply referring to the crapulous briefing . . . ). Fortunately, Judge Selya had the opportunity to decide a case involving a bar serving a noticeably crapulous customer.
My previous posts about Judge Selya can be found here and here. A tip of the hat to one of my regular lurkers out there for pointing this article out to me!
The Write Bailiwick 
Jason Rakowski said,
February 5, 2008 at 1:31 am
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Jason Rakowski
Emmel Philips said,
February 5, 2008 at 6:05 pm
Thank you!
I try to focus on writing without getting consumed by blog stats, but I do inevitably wonder about the readers out there. I appreciate your kind words and am glad to be able to offer some reading amusement.
All the best,
Emmel
Emmel Philips said,
February 5, 2008 at 10:32 pm
*Sigh* Vanity of vanities; all is vanity!
Thanks to my tech-savvy husband, I submit that that Mr. Rakowski is a spamer that fooled me. My blog does not seem to appear on technorati and a Google search revealed the identical comment appears on 600+ blogs (posted by various names). The comment apparently comes from a “bot” which (as my husband explained and I barely understand) somehow posts on all sorts of blogs. I suppose its purpose is to drum up traffic on his own blog. Since his blog exists, and the generic comment makes sense, I was fooled. I should trust my filter better, which marked the comment as spam in the first place!