September* is always a lovely month, especially as it brings us the lovely IG Nobel awards, a celebration of the most unlikely things to be put under the scrutiny of scientists, from around the world. 

*In the alternate gen-z universe, it means remorse at not needing ‘back to school shopping’ as instead “suddenly it’s just another september with a spending problem” How the worlds turn.

2022 was no exception (for the IG’s,not the Z’s), with entries (eh-hm) ranging from ‘A Multidisciplinary Approach to Ritual Enema Scenes on Ancient Maya Pottery’ to my favourite: 

Eric Martínez, Francis Mollica, and Edward Gibson, for analyzing what makes legal documents unnecessarily difficult to understand.

This kind of investigation appeals to me no end.

Basically as you grow old in the creative services biz, you end up spending more time writing bids, proposals, opener’s for clients’ speeches, rationalisation, post-rationalisations, post-post-rationalisations and email apologising for all manner of misses, than getting near actual design (‘hooray’ I hear the design teams yelling.)

And that’s ok - because the jokes on them. Being able (or at least sentient enough. Amounts to much the same sometimes) to frame the project means in reality, you’re pretty close to designing how the project will go. And if you’re really good, it can actually keep ‘others’ from trying to steer things their way… but lawyers (and apologies), but they’re in a league/al of their own when it comes to impenetrability.

Turns out the study - which looked at ‘psycholinguistics hypothesis’ (nope. Me neither) - showed that using the ‘heretofores, whereas’s, hereinafter’s and hereinbefore’s, as well as the dreaded center-embedding (nesting phrases inside of phrases - ‘A man that a woman that a child that a bird that I heard saw knows loves’ is a particularly lovely example) - renders the layperson totally disarmed. And then simply sign it.

No? Don’t tell me you actually read the T’s & C’s.

Cannot wait to bring a similar jurisprudence to project codicils forthwith and heretofore lite(s) pendente(s). As the closing remarks to the court go, "M’lord, I put it to you my case for this proposal’s need is unarguable." I rest my case.