Cease and Desist

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name’s Cassie, and I’m calling from Tallahassee.

Hi, Cassie. How you doing?

I’m doing well. How are you?

Oh, we’re great here. Welcome to the show.

What can we do for you?

Well, my question is about the phrase cease and desist.

I want to know where it comes from and when it’s appropriate to use, because whenever I looked up the words, they always just said the opposite of each other.

So, like, when you looked up the word cease, it meant to stop, desist, or when you looked up desist, it meant to stop, cease.

So it kind of just sounds like you’re saying stop and stop.

It’s kind of like a new form of time travel, right? You just keep going into the dictionary loop.

See Dictionary A.

Yeah.

See NGV.

And so what have you been doing wrong that you’re getting letters from lawyers?

What?

Good question.

What have you been doing?

Who’s telling you to cease and desist, Kathy?

What kind of court orders are coming to your house?

No, I first came across that phrase reading, I think it was a C.S. Lewis book as a kid.

It kind of randomly pops up every now and then.

It’s become a pet peeve of mine because it just means stop and stop.

Well, it’s interesting because there is a slight difference in these two words.

It’s one of what we call legal doublets, and there are a lot of these in legal language, if you think about it, like will and testament, you know, or all and sundry, aid and abet, words that are very, very, very close together.

And they sort of create this airtight meaning.

Because if you think about cease and desist, I think what most attorneys would tell you is that it means stop and don’t ever do it again, basically.

And where cease alone means to quit something that you’ve been doing.

And desist means never start something up.

Right.

And so between the two, you’re saying not only do we want you to stop, there is no period at which we want you to begin doing this activity.

Yes, and for us lay people, they do look the same, but there are different shades of meaning there.

In law, they pile on the language in order to make sure that nobody can quibble with a single word later.

Yeah, they love that legalese.

Yes, exactly.

And some of it has to do with, interesting enough, to the linguistic heritage that we share, where some of it comes from the Anglo-Saxon heritage and some of it comes from the French heritage or the Latin heritage.

And so you kind of just want to make sure you’re getting all your little nuances taken care of there.

Yeah, you’ll have one term from each language.

Oh, okay.

If you want more of these kinds of things, Martha tipped you off.

She said legal doublet, but more broadly, there are lexical doublets.

There are a lot of words that we pair in English in an idiomatic way that work together like this.

Aiden, a bet is my favorite one.

I think cease and desist might be my favorite one now.

There we go. Yeah, make it a favorite.

It’s better to be favorite than a peeve, right?

Yes.

Well, now I know, and I’ll know how to use it properly.

That’s right.

And you’ll always think of us when you use it, right?

I will.

All right.

We’ll never cease and never desist from being curious, all right?

Will do.

You guys have a good one.

Okay.

Thanks, Kathy.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

This is a show about words and language.

We’ll take your calls about speech, writing, anything.

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