What is the 'it'?

Like the proverbial frog in the slowly warming water, it has been gradually dawning on me that I don’t know the difference between “consequently” and “consequentially”.

The judges that I work for seem to alternate between the two, and, for better or worse, I have been inclined to let the two words land as they have fallen. Perhaps if a judge has used both in close succession, with seemingly the same meaning, I might raise it as a consistency issue. But not otherwise. Best to know what you are talking about before you open your mouth.

My instinct is that “consequently” means “Thing 1 happens, and then, because Thing 1 happened, Thing 2 happens.” What does that boil down to? Thing 2 happened “as a consequence of” Thing 1.

“Consequentially”, on the other hand, I would have thought carries with it a sense of being in some way “significant” or “important”. That’s a bit more vague or amorphous, admittedly. But it doesn’t just mean one thing follows another.

In that way, my instinct would be that judges who use “consequentially” are often doing the thing judges do, of adding a syllable to a word when it isn’t necessarily wanted or needed, but because More Syllables = More Lawyerly. Sometimes that is fine, but occasionally it causes them to use the wrong word – “affectation” instead of “affection”, for example.

The law itself may have contributed to this. (I think the technical term here is “lol”.) What is “consequential loss” or “consequential damages”? The meaning here is not “significant” or “important”, it’s just “as a result of”. Likewise “consequential provisions” of legislation: they are the least important provisions in an Act.

It was time for me to do some research.

I have on my desk a one-volume Macquarie, and a Concise Oxford. I also have access to the online OED, perhaps the mother of all dictionaries. The Macquarie supports my instinct with “consequently”, but allows “consequentially” to mean both “in consequence” and “of consequence or importance”. That seems to support my present hands-off approach.

The Concise Oxford doesn’t seem to acknowledge the latter meaning of “consequentially” at all. There, “consequentially” and “consequential” are both just derivatives of “consequent” (as in “as a consequence”). Again, this seems to support letting the judges do whatever they want.

The online OED – which, I’m sorry to say, sometimes contains too much information for its own good – only gives one meaning of “consequential” that supports the “of importance” sense of the word, and that is marked as “obsolete”. It doesn’t seem to like “consequentially” much, either: the only two meanings not said to be obsolete are one along the lines of “consequential provisions” and one that seems to mean “of feigned importance”, eg, “he moved through the room consequentially”. (See again, perhaps, “affectation”.) The only non-“obsolete” meaning given for “consequently” is along the lines of “as a consequence” or “in consequence of”. Thus, aside from the wild-card appearance of that possible third meaning, this suggests to me that, according to the OED, judges shouldn’t use “consequentially” at all if what they mean is “consequently”.

Okay, that’s a rule. We like rules.

From here, I turned to Fowler’s – and was surprised to find an interesting case of Fowler versus Fowler. The Fowler of 1926 was of the opinion – mind you, the Fowler of 1926 was nothing if not of an opinion – that “consequential” most certainly did not mean “of importance”. Seventy years later, Burchfield, the editor of The New Fowler’s – and himself no slouch – felt the need to put the old man in his place. (He also pushes against the OED’s claim that the “of importance” sense of the word is obsolete.)

The New Fowler’s, which is a usage guide and not a dictionary, favours “consequent” over “consequential”, but also makes a distinction that I just can’t see: is there a clear difference between Thing 2 happening “as a result of” Thing 1 having happened, on the one hand, and Thing 2 being in the nature of “a consequence or sequel” of Thing 1, on the other? I think I might struggle to thread that needle.

Burchfield does make what is (for our purposes) a possibly relevant final point: that “consequential” has “various technical meanings in law and insurance”.

The inferred vibe from all of the above, it seems to me, is that “consequently” is generally to be preferred, but if you’re a lawyer and you like the sound of the word “consequentially” then by all means have at it.

Which, I guess, takes me back to where I first started: (a) confused; and (b) inclined to let the judges do whatever they want. Makes my job easy! And good luck to anyone who wants to argue that the judge has used the wrong word.