Template:Oubliette capsule: Difference between revisions
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A [[negotiation oubliette]] is the lawyer’s equivalent of what {{author|Douglas Adams}} once called<ref>The wonderful {{br|The Meaning of Liff: The Original Dictionary Of Things There Should Be Words For}}, by {{author|Douglas Adams}} and {{author|John Lloyd}}. </ref> a “clabby” conversation: one struck up by a [[rent-seeker|commissionaire]] to avoid meaningful work, waste time and provoke maximum confusion. [[Negotiation oubliette]]s have a cosmological quality to them; like any 1[[Schwarzschild radius of institutional ennui|black-hole]] they are, by design, impossible to see ''directly'' — detectable only by the signature detritus of crushed aspirations of clarity and elegance swirling around its event horizon like so many delicate dreams of greatness gurgling down a plughole — so we enter them unwittingly, and it is only when we see what we have done and scrabble desperately for a way to back out that we realise what we have fallen into, and | A [[negotiation oubliette]] is the lawyer’s equivalent of what {{author|Douglas Adams}} once called<ref>The wonderful {{br|The Meaning of Liff: The Original Dictionary Of Things There Should Be Words For}}, by {{author|Douglas Adams}} and {{author|John Lloyd}}. </ref> a “clabby” conversation: one struck up by a [[rent-seeker|commissionaire]] to avoid meaningful work, waste time and provoke maximum confusion. [[Negotiation oubliette]]s have a cosmological quality to them; like any 1[[Schwarzschild radius of institutional ennui|black-hole]] they are, by design, impossible to see ''directly'' — detectable only by the signature detritus of crushed aspirations of clarity and elegance swirling around its event horizon like so many delicate dreams of greatness gurgling down a plughole — so we enter them unwittingly, and it is only when we see what we have done and scrabble desperately for a way to back out that we realise what we have fallen into, and the conceptual impossibility of any such withdrawal. | ||
Revision as of 13:18, 11 June 2021
A negotiation oubliette is the lawyer’s equivalent of what Douglas Adams once called[1] a “clabby” conversation: one struck up by a commissionaire to avoid meaningful work, waste time and provoke maximum confusion. Negotiation oubliettes have a cosmological quality to them; like any 1black-hole they are, by design, impossible to see directly — detectable only by the signature detritus of crushed aspirations of clarity and elegance swirling around its event horizon like so many delicate dreams of greatness gurgling down a plughole — so we enter them unwittingly, and it is only when we see what we have done and scrabble desperately for a way to back out that we realise what we have fallen into, and the conceptual impossibility of any such withdrawal.
- ↑ The wonderful The Meaning of Liff: The Original Dictionary Of Things There Should Be Words For, by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd.