Subsidiary Universal Maxims

First Maxim: “Giving effect to speech is preferable to disregarding it.”

Linguistically, assigning a meaningful, linguistically appropriate ruling to an utterance is better than nullifying it, for a rational person safeguards his words from redundancy whenever possible. Juristically, the maxim means that the words of any speaker—be he the Lawgiver, a contracting party, someone who swears an oath, or anyone else—must be applied according to their real meanings. For example, if someone says to another, “I give this item to you as a gift,” the recipient takes it, and the giver later claims that by “gift” he meant a sale and demands that the recipient swear an oath, his claim is rejected, because the default in speech is the literal sense; and a gift, by definition, is a transfer of ownership without compensation.

Second Maxim: “When the literal meaning is impossible, one resorts to the figurative.”

The literal sense is the point of departure, and the figurative sense is secondary. Because the figurative is a substitute for the literal, the real meaning of a word is binding unless there is a factor that favors the figurative. For a word to be understood figuratively, there must be an indicator that precludes intending the literal sense—for instance, when the literal sense has become obsolete in customary usage. Thus, if a person swears not to eat this flour and then eats bread made from it, he has broken his oath, for eating raw flour—as opposed to bread—is unknown in ordinary practice.

Third Maxim: “An unqualified statement remains absolute unless there is explicit or contextual evidence that restricts it.”

An unqualified term is one that denotes a matter free of any limitations, whereas a qualified term is one that is defined by some restriction. The word “horse,” for example, is absolute; when we say “a white horse,” it becomes qualified. The purport of the maxim is that the unqualified term is acted upon in its unrestricted state until evidence arises