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. | 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 oubliettes have a cosmological quality to them; like any [[Schwarzschild radius of institutional ennui|black-hole]] they are, by design, impossible to see ''directly'' — detectable only by their signature detritus; crushed aspirations of clarity and elegance swirling around an event horizon of nothingness like so many delicate dreams of greatness gurgling down a plughole. We enter them often, but always unwittingly, because only when we scrabble desperately for a way to back out do we realise what we have fallen into. Only then does the conceptual impossibility of such a withdrawal occur. | ||
Revision as of 13:40, 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 black-hole they are, by design, impossible to see directly — detectable only by their signature detritus; crushed aspirations of clarity and elegance swirling around an event horizon of nothingness like so many delicate dreams of greatness gurgling down a plughole. We enter them often, but always unwittingly, because only when we scrabble desperately for a way to back out do we realise what we have fallen into. Only then does the conceptual impossibility of such a withdrawal occur.
- ↑ The wonderful The Meaning of Liff: The Original Dictionary Of Things There Should Be Words For, by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd.