I have got to stop making jokes in Ethics class. I really do; the lecturer has actually started telling stories about me to the other classes. Not stories about the zany humour, mind you, but about how I am the least ethical person to ever hit law school. Think about that for a minute: he's comparing me to people who eventually became lawyers. In a negative way.
This is clearly the lowest point of my life.

It's first marks back, today, and I did pretty well. We're all very interested in each other's grades, so I've just taken to saying I did pretty well to give the impression I kicked ass and took names.
I did though. Feeling moderately smug.

I handed in my paper for Crim101 last Friday. Surprisingly, I had finished it early and went over the word limit. I'm changing, and I'm not entirely convinced it's for the best. My house is also very, very clean and tidy. I guess this means that if I stop making stupid, mean-spirited jokes at other people's expense, I won't have a definable personality at all. This is how lawyers are made. They go into law school scruffy, lazy and rude and come out as go-getting neat freaks. Still rude, mind you.
Strangely enough, (and here you should just pause to admire the neatness of my segue), this is not only an accurate summary of law school, but was part of my criminal law paper. It's like this. Law students are isolated from other students physically(I'm writing this on the 8th level of the library. The special, law student-only section. My lecture rooms, also only for law students, are up above. That's right: we are literally above everyone else, not just figuratively, like normal) and socially, in an environment where we are forced to develop our own language to communicate efficiently. This is pushed along by our lecturers, who mimic the judge-lawyer relationship and introduce new terms and methods of speech. Then we go out to the courts, observe more lawyers and judges. Then we write a paper on what we saw. In order to perform well, we write the way we've heard everyone speak. Then we discuss the paper (in order to ascertain our level in the pecking order, naturally) in the same terms. Later, when we get our results, the comments will be in the language of the law and will often be corerecting our version of the legal dialect. It's a weird little self-reinforcing speech community; a linguistic club we can't help joining.
What I'm trying to say here is that my paper was about my writing a paper, and I was writing about the way I was writing and my marks will be based on my lecturer's assessment of my judgement of his willingness to assign marks on the basis of writing about my writing about my method of writing about his assessment methods.
Still, I'm pretty confident that my language hasn't been affected by law school.