Equally he cautions against "vagueness":

"Just as overdrafting can affect a provision in unforeseen ways, underdrafting is equally dangerous. Although it is often necessary or desirable to create a general or broad legislative standard or directive, beware of language that is so indefinite that it is meaningless or begs a challenge in court as invalid for vagueness. Generally, courts loathe declaring a law invalid on this ground, but careful drafting can eliminate the need for judicial scrutiny."¹⁹

In their book, Butt & Castle²⁰ recommend that "legal documents should be written in modern, standard English - that is, in standard English as currently used and understood.". This seems to amount to a recognition on the part of the authors that words, especially "modern, standard" words, do not have a fixed and uniform meaning.

The generic character of most words is of concern to anyone trying to express themselves with precision. This point was succinctly expressed by Potter²¹ who said that "Few words have fixed significations like the pure numbers of mathematics.". This is the primary reason why the adoption of plain language in legislative drafting must be approached with a great degree of caution. As expressed by Professor Bates,²² one of the fundamental constraints which plain language drafting is subject to is, that language is not plain - as a word may well have a number of meanings. So for example, "attend" cannot be replaced by "turn up", "notify" cannot become "tell" etc.