GERY - The Law Mind Legal Dictionary

GERYAuthored

The Law Mind • 570 words

Definition

An obsolete legal and literary term meaning changeable, inconstant, or fickle in character or disposition. GERY appears in historical legal and literary contexts to describe persons or conditions characterized by variability or unpredictability. The term has no independent operational meaning in modern law and survives only as a historical curiosity in archaic texts.

Common Language

Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not in current standard use; archaic.

Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Changeable; fickle. [Obs.] Chaucer."

The term appears in Chaucer's Middle English writings with the sense of erratic or capricious temperament. Any encounter with GERY in a legal manuscript or early text should be read as a character descriptor — carrying the sense of unreliability or inconstancy — rather than as a term of art with formal legal effect.

Common Confusion

Anderson's Dictionary of Law does not define GERY as a standalone term. The historical dictionary entry associated with this term in the source material appears to be a fragment concerning persons in public employment and personal property concepts, suggesting a possible indexing or transcription error in the source corpus. Researchers who encounter GERY in an Anderson's citation trail should verify whether the reference is to the term itself or to a surrounding entry, as the fragment may represent displaced text from adjacent entries on PERSONAL or related headwords.

Why It Matters in Research

This term is a research hazard rather than a research tool. Its primary risk in the Law Mind corpus is false attribution: if GERY appears as a headword followed by substantive content, that content almost certainly belongs to an adjacent or displaced entry. The Anderson's source fragment associated with this term — discussing persons in public employment, personal actions, personal assets, personal injury, and related concepts — bears no semantic relationship to the word GERY and strongly suggests a digitization or OCR artifact in the source material.

Researchers working with historical legal dictionaries, particularly 19th-century American compilations, should be alert to this pattern. Headword corruption, page-boundary errors, and index misalignment are common in early dictionary digitization projects. When a term's listed definition does not correspond to its plain meaning or legal context, treat the entry with suspicion and cross-reference neighboring entries in the original source.

If a researcher encounters GERY in a primary legal document predating the 20th century, it will almost certainly carry its literary meaning — capricious, changeable — applied descriptively to a person or condition. It would not trigger a specific legal doctrine or rule.

Historical Dictionary Support

Webster's 1913 is the only historical source that defines GERY on its own terms, marking it explicitly as obsolete and attributing its use to Chaucer. Anderson's Dictionary of Law provides no definition that corresponds to the word; the entry content in the source material is plainly misattributed, consisting of fragments from entries on personal property, personal liability, public employment, and related concepts. No historical legal dictionary in the standard reference corpus — Black's, Bouvier's, or Burrill's — carries a dedicated entry for GERY as a legal term of art, which is consistent with the word never having achieved technical legal status. It remained a literary descriptor that occasionally colored legal prose in the medieval and early modern periods without developing doctrinal content.

GERYmain

Anderson's Dictionary of Law • 1890

Persons in public employment. See LIBEL, 5. See also ARREST, 2; BAIL, 2; BODY, 1; CITIZEN; EXPOSE; IDENTITY, 1; INDIVIDUAL; INSPECTION, 2; JURISDICTION, 2; NAME, 1. Personal. Pertaining to the person; betonging to an individual person; individual: as, personal or a personal - action, asset, baggage, chattel, contract, covenant, credit, demand, disability, estate, goods, injury, knowledge, liability, liberty, note, performance, property, representative, security, service, servitude, tax., Referring to some subjects - as, an action, asset, chattel, estate, property "personal" means simply movable, transitory: that which may follow the person of the owner or defendant. Again, referring to some subjects - as, an action, contract or covenant, defendant, injury, privilege, security, service, tax - “personal" is contrasted with real, or that which concerns real estate. See those substantives. Personalty. Personal property, q. v. Personate. To assume the character of another without authority and do something to his or a third person's detriment. Known as "false personation," which is a misdemeanor both at common law and, generally, by statute.1 In England, since 1874, to personate any person or his heir, executor, etc., with intent to claim succession to property, or falsely to claim relationship to any family, is a felony, punishable with penal servitude for life.2 There may be a false personation of an officer for the purpose of making a pretended arrest, or collecting fines, taxes, or other alleged dues. Falsely personating any person under the provisions of the naturalization laws, or any person holding a claim against the government, are criminal offenses. See CHINESE, p. 177, sec. 7; PRETENSE, False.