A fossil legalism is a legal term of art, technically accurate and often decades old, whose original meaning has drifted or gone strange while the phrase itself keeps circulating unglossed in news copy. Nobody explains it because it appears on an official document, and appearing on the document is treated as its own justification. What the word does to a reader who has no legal training goes unexamined.
- Two outlets covering the same charges quoted, without a single gloss, that a defendant “engaged in unlawful sexual intercourse” with a child. In the 1956 statute the charge is drawn from, “unlawful” marked intercourse outside marriage; on the page today, unglossed, it invites the inference that some lawful category of sexual intercourse with an eight-year-old exists, pending paperwork.
- One headline’s own choice of adjective, “historical,” does adjacent work: a genuine legal term for non-recent offences that, once it migrates to the headline, relocates the story’s weight from the act to the calendar.
