| ## | CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Romanette?
MS. SAHARSKY: Oh, little Roman numeral.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: I've never heard that before. That's — Romanette. |
This 'Romanette' term appears to be
something of a puzzle:
| ## | . . . I suspect that Ms. Saharsky used the word entirely without thinking about it: To her, it was quite normal, though to the Chief Justice it was unknown (as it was to me and to some other lawyers I've talked to).
So what's going on? The word is in no dictionary that I could find. It appears in no Nexis-searchable publication. A Google search for "Romanette" in English-language pages revealed fewer than 35 pages that used the word before Monday, once all the false positives (the names of people, horses, green bean varieties, blinds, and the like) were removed.
And yet the word, with precisely the meaning Ms. Saharasky used, appears in six court opinions, from federal court in Oklahoma, bankruptcy courts in Texas and Pennsylvania, and state courts in Minnesota, plus ten sources in Westlaw's TP-ALL database (all in practitioner journals, not in traditional law reviews). And the Google hits — mostly from legal documents — come from a similarly wide range of sources: the minutes of a Novato, California City Council meeting, a manual of contract drafting, a transcript of an Idaho Senate commitee meeting, and more. What's more, all but a few use the word as matter-of-factly as Ms. Saharasky did, without any indication that the word is anything novel and unusual; the remaining ones are queries about what the word means or brief discussions of its meaning. |
My hunch is that this exchange has landed the term 'romanette' a new degree of respectability in English discourse. But I for one had never heard of it, and the
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 6th ed. (digital search), has no entry for it.
My question: Have you encountered the word before? (In this sense, or any other?)
Poll
