I’d like to think a fitting epitaph, literally and figuratively, for the JC as and when he finally shuffles off this mortal coil. Should anyone care enough to have a whip-round for a tombstone, I’d be good with that.
In the service of statutory and contractual interpretation, the directive that one should afford a fair, large and liberal interpretation to a gobbet of text — especially a elegant sparse one — is an entreaty not to be a penis — to not go out of your way to imagine phantoms lurking in its sombre cadence or to make out the outline of succubi and incubi in the emergent contiguities of its glyphs and serifs; not to freight it with absurd, paranoid, counter-intuitive and essential point-defeating meaning — a temptation which, as we all know, many commercial lawyers find it tremendously hard, in their heart of hearts, to resist.
