Incluso
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Towards more picturesque speech™
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The incluso is the opposite of a proviso.
A proviso may be a ginger, lilly-livered construction, but at least it does something: it states a proposition and then weasels out of it:
- The promisor herewith agrees to pay, unconditionally and in full, all amounts due, provided that on no account shall such promisor be liable for: ... [here follows a catalogue of exceptions great and small the sum total of which will equal, or perhaps even exceed, the value of the commitment so generously given].
An incluso, by contrast, states that proposition, and then illustratively repeats it, bearing useful confirmation only to those who enjoy miscellany or are afflicted by doubt as to whether you meant what you said in the first place:
- We will send such confirmations and information in such form (including paper, writing, parchment, scrolls, hand-signals, facial tics, morse code, semaphore, maritime signalling systems or other symbolic languages (whether or not depending for their efficacy upon the assistance and/or configuration of flags) as we shall determine from time to time.
A well crafted incluso will drag into contemplation items which no ordinary reading of the general principle could possibly have anticipated.
Boss moves
- The nested incluso: A seasoned practitioner will enjoy the nested incluso, where one redundant elucidation is embedded into another “the Client shall be obliged to pay the Bank’s costs including without limitation, filing fees, the costs of realisation and enforcement of collateral and associated professioonal fees, including those of legal and consulting advisors ...” — we can see at once that this way a rabbit-hole lies, and down it the theoretical possibility of an unbroken chain of ever-smaller inclusos, stretching out into an infinite panoply of parenthetical asides; a kind of fractal geometry of scale-invariant pointlessness, whose existence in this universe is only really hindered by the draftsperson’s outright fear that, far from the sky falling on his head instead some unseen warping of the very fabric of semantic space will swallow him up and regurgitate him in some remote corner of the lexiverse, as a spume of incandescent flannel.
- The provuso: The sign of a true legal master is the provuso, which is an amalgam of a proviso and an incluso, a device by which one states a general principle, then caveats it so comprehensively that the end result bears no correlation at all with the originally intended. This is a way of weaselling your counterparty into a whole new obligation, that neither party possibly could have had in mind when discussing the original trade, while at the same time yourself wriggling out of your basic economic commitment.