Pardon My French. The New Language of the Emergent AI Priesthood.

At the Salisbury assizes in the summer of 1631, Chief Justice Richardson condemned a prisoner for felony, and the prisoner demonstrated his violent disagreement with the ruling by throwing a brickbat2 at the judge’s head (he missed). The court’s response: the man was indicted3, his right hand was cut off and fixed to the gibbet4, and he was hanged immediately, in the presence of the court.5

The reason lawyers still love telling this story four centuries later has nothing to do with the outcome. Rather, it has to do with how it was written down: “ject un brickbat a le dit justice, que narrowly mist.”

That sentence is what is known as “Law French,” the professional language of the English legal system for roughly half a millennium, and it is one of the most famous passages ever written in it. A trained legal mind, writing in the required dialect of his guild, needed the French word for “threw” and wrote “ject.” Then he needed “brickbat,” found nothing obvious, and switched to English6. He did the same with “narrowly mist,” which even a non-French speaker can understand. What is clear is that by 1631, the official language of English justice had become such a stretch that its own practitioners could hardly manufacture a complete sentence in it.

And yet, it remained the official language of the law for another ninety-nine years.

Hold that thought for a moment, because at the same time the French were conducting a related linguistic experiment, and between the two of them they document (with unusual candor) a business model that is currently being rebuilt in every industry at record speed.

I.The Rise and Fall of Silence

Around the beginning of the sixteenth century, French words started gaining weight7. Doigt, the word for finger, acquired a ‘g’ that no true speaker of French would be caught dead pronouncing8, on the grounds that because the word descended from the Latin digitus, it ought to account for its founding letters. Temps took its ‘p’ and ‘s’ from tempus. Vingt picked up a ‘g’ from viginti. Even poids got a silent ‘d’ to honor its Latin ancestor pondus, which would have been a lovely gesture except that poids doesn’t descend from pondus.9 The new letters had no effect on the pronunciation of the words, they just changed how the words looked (and more importantly, who could spell them correctly10).

The stated rationale of this linguistic legislation was to prove a suitable pedigree11. French was attempting to position itself as Latin’s rightful heir, and etymological spelling provided sufficient documentation to back it up. Most of the actual writing was done by praticiens12 — the legal clerks and scribes who produced documents for a living — and the profession had incentives that had nothing to do with etymology. Documents were billed by length13, and when you are compensated by the line, it doesn’t pay to go hunting for shorter spellings. Beyond volume there was exclusivity — a way of ensuring that document production stayed inside the guild.

If that reads as cynical, the guild actually admitted as much in 1673. The Académie française, deliberating over the spelling for its first official dictionary, resolved to keep the old orthography because (in the recorded words of the historian Mézeray) it “distinguishes men of letters from ignorants and simple women.”14 The letters may have been silent, but the organization had no trouble saying the quiet part out loud.

Meanwhile, back in England, the legal profession didn’t bother complicating the mother tongue.15 French arrived in the courts with the Conquest and stuck around. By 1362 the situation was absurd enough that Parliament passed the Statute of Pleading16, which complained that ordinary people “have no knowledge nor understanding” of what was being said for them or against them in their own lawsuits, and required that pleadings be conducted in English. Parliament wrote this statute in French.17 The professional literature stayed in Law French for nearly four more centuries, decaying steadily until it hit what I call the “brickbat stage,” where it remained (functionally dead, contractually alive) until an Act of Parliament in 1730 finally required English justice to be conducted in English.

Why did it stick around so long? If a litigant can’t read the documents that decide their fate, they need someone who can. Law French functionally became a toll booth. Roger North (a first-rate lawyer of the era) argued that the law was “scarcely expressible properly in English.” He was arguing for precision to the point of exclusivity. The profession that fought against translation survived the transition, and the precision managed to survive as well.18 What was lost was the toll booth. The only casualty of translation was the toll booth.

II.A Language Built in a Day

Which brings me to your last vendor call.

Your company is making purchasing decisions, signing indemnities, and accepting risk in a dialect assembled at startup speed: agentic, retrieval-augmented, guardrailed, grounded, constitutional. The terms show up in board memos, procurement and security questionnaires, and governance paperwork. These terms are being used by people who learned it last quarter from the people selling it.

And though the lawyers were the priesthood in 1631, in 2026 they’ve become the commoners. The general counsel in the procurement review is listening to their own case be argued in a language they don’t speak, deciding whether to nod. I have watched attorneys who would never let an ambiguous indemnity clause survive the first redline pass over “the model may occasionally hallucinate” as an acceptable disclosure.

That word “hallucinate” probably deserves its own article, because the new dialect (built by the marketers who want you to buy it) is very good at laundering. “Hallucination” sounds like a quirk of an artistic temperament. When you rewrite the sentence in plain English — “the system may state falsehoods as fact” — the mood in the room cools significantly. “Guardrail” implies civil engineering when in reality it is often a far-from-reliable regular expression.19 “Human in the loop” implies the human knows how and when to stop the loop, which is an empirical claim that is being tested in production a thousand times per second today. It is a fact that every field grows its own shorthand (most of which is innocent), but shorthand that consistently softens defects in one direction? The praticiens at least had the decency to bill for their obfuscation.

If you’re looking for the tell that indicates when professional dialect has decayed from precision into liturgy, the ‘brickbat’ note is its type specimen: listen for the moment the priesthood runs out of language mid-sentence. “The agent hallucinated because the retrieval, um, grabbed the wrong doc.” When the practitioners have to patch the dialect with plain English to describe what actually happened, it’s a good sign that the precision defense is over.

III.The Statute of Pleading (Second Printing)

If this history teaches one thing, it is that these priestly languages eventually get legislated. At some point the people on the paying side of the toll booth acquire subpoena20 power and force a translation into a more comprehensible context.

When Colorado passed the first comprehensive state AI act in 2024 (requiring, among other things, that when an AI system decides something consequential about a person, the person gets a statement of the principal reasons) it was delayed, sued, and rewritten into a slimmer law that won’t go into effect next year.21 The EU AI Act’s Article 86 grants people affected by high-risk AI decisions the right to “clear and meaningful explanations.” As with Colorado, the obligation was due August 2 of this year, until Brussels provisionally slid the high-risk timeline to December 2027.22 The toll booth’s defenders are winning the scheduling fights, just as they won most of them between 1362 and 1730. But they never manage to reverse the direction. Every delay, every rewrite, every lawsuit has conceded the premise: translation will be required.

And what is perhaps most interesting of all is that these new laws are frequently restating (or expanding) existing laws. Since the 1970s, if an algorithm denies someone credit, ECOA and Regulation B require the specific principal reasons be made available to the applicant. There isn’t an option to argue “the model is too complex to explain.”23 Guidance may come and go as administrations change, but the demand for translation, once enacted, has a near-perfect survival record.

And even where no statute reaches, discovery does. Litigation is, among other things, a compulsory translation service: your model cards, eval reports, and “guardrail” tickets all get rendered into plain English by the least sympathetic translator available, on a schedule set by opposing counsel, at rates that make the praticiens look restrained. France actually tried to legislate its way out of the original version of this problem in 1539, ordering that all judgments be issued “in the maternal French language” so there would be no ambiguity.24 The mandate emerged at one layer while the dialect was rebuilt at another.25

IV.Left Without Excuse

Whether you like it or not, or are prepared or not, your AI operations will be translated into the language of legal consequence. Between Article 86, the state acts queued behind Colorado’s, the credit statutes, and a discovery process that needs no legislation at all, the translation has been scheduled. The variables in your control are the translator, the timing, and the audience.

The standard worth holding your AI operation to now, while the translation is still voluntary, is to take your highest-stakes automated workflow and try to state, in plain declarative sentences, what it decides, what data it was pointed at, who can stop it, and what the specific reasons were for the last decision it made about a real person. If the answer keeps reaching for the dialect (“well, the guardrails constrain the agent’s alignment”), you are not describing the system. You are reciting the liturgy. Before long you’ll be reciting it to the one audience (a regulator, a plaintiff’s expert, your own board under oath) that will no longer be nodding along, because the consequences have manifested.

At Privlex, translation at scale and under privilege is the work we do best. We render what your AI systems actually decide (on a per-decision basis, in production, sanctioned or shadow) into the language the regimes speak: specific reasons, specific obligations, drafted with your counsel, before anyone shows up with a subpoena and a dictionary.26 Your lawyers are fluent in the target language. We’re fluent in the source.

Let us help you do the translation while it still counts as preparation, rather than testimony.