united-kingdom parliament naming-conventions
How should the parenthesised components of statute names be pronounced?
<p>For instance, consider the</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Housing (tenancy deposits) (prescribed information) order 2007</p>
</blockquote>
<p>(Which reads quite naturally just strung sequentially together).</p>
<p>Or the</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Torts (interference with goods) act 1977</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Which is more troublesome.</p>
<p>Or, the</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Act 2016.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>How should these less natural names be pronounced, as they sound incoherent when one cannot visually see the parentheses, and: what is the purpose of naming it this way, when it could much more naturally be named the &quot;Fitness of Homes for Human Habitation Act,&quot; or the &quot;Residential Fitness for Human Habitation Act.&quot;</p>
<p>On the other hand, the Renting Homes (Wales) Act 2016 reads together quite naturally in its natural sequential order.</p>
<p>Why not just make more uniformly natural, coherent, and undisjointed names for laws in the first place instead of stringing together multiple incoherent separate fragments with parenthesised elements?</p>

<h2>Legally, nothing</h2>
<p>Grammatically they mean what parenthesis always mean, that the parenthesised words are less important i.e. parenthetical.</p>
<p>Organisationally they serve to group legislation together. This is particularly common in regulations and other subordinate legislation where the tradition is that the regulation takes the name of the Act it is created under. Where there is more than one, the specific function of the regulation is put in parentheses. For heavily legislated areas, like Housing, some parliaments do the same thing for Acts.</p>

<p>Put a comma sized pause whenever ( or ) appears in the written text and also between the words and the year even if the year is not offset by parenthesis.</p>
<p>So when you are reading it aloud, you would say:</p>
<p>Housing comma-sized-pause tenancy deposits comma-sized-pause prescribed information comma-sized-pause order comma-sized-pause 2007</p>
<p>If you want another written representation:</p>
<p>Housing, tenancy deposits, prescribed information, order, 2007</p>
<p>If you wanted to get really fancy and precise, the phrase &quot;tenancy deposits&quot; and the phrase &quot;prescribed information&quot; would also be spoken with an ever so slightly elevated but hushed or breathy pitch relative to &quot;Housing&quot;, &quot;order&quot; and &quot;2007&quot; which might be pronounced a bit more &quot;firmly.&quot;</p>
<p>You could also say that the accents in the phrase fall on &quot;Housing&quot;, &quot;order&quot; and &quot;2007&quot; while &quot;tenancy deposits&quot; and &quot;prescribed information&quot; are unaccented.</p>
