Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
This one is so common, I’m not sure it even constitutes an eggcorn. It might have simply evolved into an accepted form. Still, I’ve met at least one judge who really cares about it, and now that it have been explained to me it drives me nuts, so it bears mentioning.
In court, you offer testimony and physical evidence “in evidence” of your case. You do not enter things “into evidence”. “Evidence” is not a place or a container. It is what you offer to support your argument.
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If one considers “evidence” to be a set of facts and other knowledge, then one might enter something “into evidence” by adding this element to the set. This would distinguish something “in evidence” as an element already identified to be a part of the evidentiary set.
I draw my distinction from the Latin preposition “in.” The accusative case implies motion toward or into, while the ablative implies something within. As a lawyer, you could see the semantic value of distinguishing whether a bullet was fired INTO a room, or WITHIN a room, both uses covered by the English “in.”
I hope I never meet that judge!
Jay Malarcher
non-lawyer
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The judge hasn’t made a very convincing argument that one shouldn’t use the word “into†with “evidence.â€
A pregnant woman go into labor; a cancer patient can go into remission; an idea can fade into oblivion; a debtor can be forced into bankruptcy; a child might retain his baby teeth into adolescence—there are probably innumerable examples—yet labor, remission, oblivion, bankruptcy, and adolescence aren’t places or containers, either.
A more cogent argument might be that you can’t enter something into evidence because it already IS evidence, whether you call it that or not. To me, it seems that a tree falling in the forest makes a noise even if there’s no one there to hear it, and a relevant document might be evidence even if no one finds it, or reports it, or cites it—but then, I’m thinking like a non-lawyer. For all I know, standard legal usage assumes that something isn’t evidence until it is officially designated as such. If that’s the case, then it seems you need some sort of verb for the act of designating something as evidence. If you don’t call that “entering into evidence,†then what do you call it?
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