Lexical Compendium

Wait... what is this? Sometimes I come across a word, phrase, idiom, quote, reference, bit of slang, person of interest, etc that either I don't know or I find amusing, interesting, etc. This is a collection of those items so that I can refer back to them in emails, texts, etc.

Recent Entries:

Tag Cloud

vocabulary slang quote politics eponymous ai science television space music word jargon movie idiom history computer-science covid thagomizer civil war shiva toffee bezos computer_science grammar earth krishna software latin movies lindy economy bees leahy ants aussie lincoln writing neologism disinformation pie chickpeas abrogate spanish pulses paradox aphorism entertainment desert religion podcast food stegosaurus astronaut engineering book foreign language aws vision israel-hamas war lindy effect clock social_insect government language virus war international time Don Quixote story screamo ottoman foreign metaphor grumbletonian games lindy's law banana plot amazon ice succession law apollo sockdologizing trading_places quotes acronym expression paleontology engine clerks spoonerism legal poem british op-ed far side public_health carl_sagan geography hindu dinosaur creole

habeas corpus

Habeas corpus is a Latin phrase meaning "you shall have the body."

It is a legal principle that safeguards individual freedom by protecting against unlawful or indefinite imprisonment and it has its origins many hundreds of years ago in England. The Magna Carta in 1215 established that no one -- not even the king -- is above the law. In the 13th century and for the next few hundred years, common law court practices involved issuing writs to check unlawful imprisonment. These started with Habeas corpus ad subjiciendum, meaning you have the body to submit [before the court]. Over time, this evolved into a powerful legal tool, eventually codified in the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679.

In the U.S., the right to habeas corpus is enshrined in the Constitution (Article I, Section 9), which states that it may only be suspended "when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it." As it was centuries ago, it remains a key check on arbitrary power by government leaders. . I’ll be honest -- if you’d asked me to define habeas corpus or explain the Magna Carta, I probably would’ve stumbled through it. I knew the term appeared in the Constitution, but I couldn’t have told you exactly what it meant.

Then came the news cycle in late May 2025.

Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, bungled answers on Tuesday about habeas corpus, incorrectly asserting that the legal right of people to challenge their detention by the government was actually the president’s “constitutional right” to deport people.

-- Gold, Michael. "Noem Incorrectly Defines Habeas Corpus as the President’s Right to Deport People" The New York Times, 20 May 2025

Heather Cox Richardson also covered this in the 20 May 2025 Letters From an American.

I'm guessing I wasn’t the only one suddenly revisiting high school civics after that performance.


(link to this entry)

References:

Tags: vocabulary, law, latin

Date Added: 22 May 2025

specious

Something that is specious is superficially plausible, but actually wrong.

You know how there are some words that you know would fit exactly what you're trying to communicate, but you can never remember them? This is one of those words for me.

The Latin speciosus means "beautiful" (or "plausible"). According to Merriam-Webster, in Middle English the word specious was used to mean "attractive." Over time, however, the word was used to denote a fake or superficial beauty.

I don't usually hear this word being used to represent a false-beauty, but more in rhetoric. A specious argument is a type of argument that seems to be good at first glance, but is actually fallacious.


(link to this entry)

References:

Tags: vocabulary

Date Added: 20 Aug 2024