Think twice about letting your kids eat nuggets in Ohio: the state's supreme court just ruled that "boneless" chicken can contain bones. The justices ruled for a restaurant sued by a patron seriously injured by the bones in their "boneless" wings. It's common knowledge that chickens have bones, they said, and "boneless" refers not to bones but to a cooking method.
"A diner reading 'boneless wings' on a menu would no more believe that the restaurant was warranting the absence of bones in the items than believe that the items were made from chicken wings, just as a person eating 'chicken fingers' would know that he had not been served fingers," Justice Joseph T. Deters wrote for the majority.
The absurdity of suggesting that "boneless" is a figurative noun like "fingers" is easy to establish: just look at the dictionary definitions of these words. But such literalism is for Deters to play with, not people choking to death in restaurants. A dissent in the 4-3 ruling makes the problem clear: the "cooking method" word game has profound implications for food safety, allows restaurants to lie about what's in their food, and makes food impossible to trust.
An example I already encounter: low-carb snacks often play word games about disclosing and concealing ingredients and it's all obviously in anticipation of courts finding the lies and the laws in alignment. If boneless means bones then "keto" sure as heck can mean more sugar than a can of coke. Is gluten a protein, or a way of life? What is a dye?
"The question must be asked: Does anyone really believe that the parents in this country who feed their young children boneless wings or chicken tenders or chicken nuggets or chicken fingers expect bones to be in the chicken? Of course they don't," Justice Michael P. Donnelly wrote in dissent. "When they read the word 'boneless,' they think that it means 'without bones,' as do all sensible people."
The thing to understand is that it's not a sign of corruption, as many blithely assume. It's smirking. It's judges as maliciously compliant genies serving the lamp, enjoying their clever but inaccurate pedantry, indifferent to public trust in the law. A good comparison is not to Clarence Thomas's luxury gifts, it's to the "I want a lawyer, dawg" case, where the courts ruled that the suspect was not unambigiously or unequivocally asserting his right to a lawyer, but demanding a "lawyer dog." No-one is fooled; the outcome is everyone hating one another just a little bit more than they did yesterday.
