This appears as so offended in the Second Quarto edition of the text (1604). The standard texts tend to accept the version in the First Folio of 1623 -- Se offendendo . On the most superficial level, the humor here comes from hearing the refined language of legal notation from the lips of rustics. Se offendendo is apparently a perversion of se defendendo , the self-defense plea. Given Elizabethan attitudes toward suicide, a "self-offense" plea provides an ironic comment on the practice of the inquests. There is an added touch of humor in this phrase since the murderer, in cases of suicide, is both the criminal and the victim. Thus, there is an odd logic to the confusion of se offendendo and se defendendo. Shakespeare uses his gravediggers not only to poke fun at legal language, but more specifically at legal logic. The clown's following speech makes a mockery of the logic used in actual suicide cases - most particularly the case of Sir James Hales, a judge who drowned himself in 1554. The argument's summery is introduced with the word, "argal," another perversion of the Latin term ergo (therefore).