Court Opinion

ID: 9752954
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 18:47:13.838587+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:27:26.354758
License: Public Domain

*636Dissenting Opinion by
Mr. Justice Musmanno:
The question involved in this case is not one of law but of simple knowledge of words. Can “an” ever mean more than one? I do not see how it can, unless all the dictionaries are wrong, common usage is incorrect and the grammar books in this country are perpetrating a hoax on students of the English language.
The simplest illustration should prove the fallacy of the decision of the Court in this case. No one would say, for instance, an apples, an oranges, an ants, an albatrosses, an Algerians, or, the phrase involved in this case, an office buildings.
The agreement between the plaintiffs and defendants carries this paragraph: “Buyer agrees to improve the site with an office building; final plans and specifications for said building to be subject to the approval of the Owner, which approval shall not be unreasonably withheld.”*
The Majority of this Court do not deny that the plaintiff had the right to limit the number of buildings which might be constructed on the land; they say that by the language employed, the.plaintiffs did not promise to limit construction to one office building.
The Majority Opinion says: “If the parties had intended to limit the land to one office building it would have been very easy to have used the word ‘one’. The Agreement contains no such restriction, nor any affirmative promise by the buyer to build only one office building. The fact that the buyer: originally built an office building in compliance with the Agreement of Sale does not prove that the Agreement restricted buyer to only one office building or compelled her to erect on the land only one office building.”
But this statement overlooks the exact phraseology of the Agreement. It not only says that the defendant *637is to improve the site with an office building, but it goes on to say that the “final plans and specifications for said building” are “to be subject to the approval of the Owner.” Here again we see the singular — “said building.”
Just as the Majority Opinion says that if the parties intended to limit the construction to one building they could have said so, it may be said also that if the parties intended to allow the construction of one more building they could have said: “one or more buildings.”
I believe that the plaintiffs blundered in asking to be allowed to prove by parol testimony that the parties in their conversations intended the word “an” to mean only one. The plaintiffs did not need parol testimony to prove what was plainly written in the Agreement. They should have demanded that the defendants show that by “an”, the parties meant more than one. Then they, the plaintiffs, could have insisted on strict application of the parol evidence rule.
The plaintiffs should have stood their ground, planted squarely on the dictionaries of the land, the language of the United States, the usage of Americans. They should have demanded that the defendant produce one instance, only one, where “an” has ever meant more than one.
Nevertheless, I believe that the lower Court rendered an improper decision and that this Court in affirming that fallacious decision, committed an error, produced an inaccuracy, perpetrated an orthographical illusion, all of which will serve as an unreliable precedent.
Mr. Justice Benjamin R. Jones joins in this dissenting opinion.

 Italics mine, throughout.