of any property not covered by a prior section. The weight of tradition is such that the lawyer writing such a document will often phrase it something like this: Traditionally, a gift of real property was called a "devise" whereas a gift of other property was a "bequest". Nowadays, the words "bequeath" and "devise" are synonymous in most jurisdictions so that "I bequeath the rest of my property to ..." is enough in both law and logic to achieve the same result. Many deeds frequently contain a traditional clause that says that the grantee is "to have and to hold" the property conveyed; this usage goes back to the days in which the instruments were drawn up in Latin, and is sometimes called a "habendam et tenendam" clause. The use of legal merisms seldom if ever adds legal effect to the document that contains them, and frequently increases their reading difficulty. However, the weight of tradition and the fear that a deviation from the established formula might have unintended legal consequences makes lawyers reluctant to revise the traditional formulae, and their clients, seeing them, at least draw the satisfaction of knowing that their documents appear to be written by a lawyer. In some cases, the doubling (or even tripling) of constituent parts in these meristic constructions arose as a result of the transition of legal discourse from Latin to French, and then from French to English. During such periods, key terms were paired with synonyms from multiple languages in an attempt to prevent ambiguity and ensure hermeneutic consistency. See also Synecdoche, referring to a whole by the name of one of its parts (or vice versa): Pars pro toto, where the part is used to refer to the whole. Totum pro parte, where the whole is used to refer to a part. Lock, stock, and barrel References Further reading William Bateson, Materials For The Study Of Variation: Treated With Especial Regard To Discontinuity In The Origin Of Species (Macmillan and Co., 1894) Bryan A. Garner, The Elements of Legal Style. (Oxford, 2001. ) Calvert Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (Oxford, 2001. ) Rhetoric Figures of speech Legal terminology Legal history