And, as the case may be, or

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Just when you thought an expression couldn't get any worse than the lilly-livered “and/or”, the good people of the European Commission’s crack drafting squad say “HOLD MY BEER”.

It might not even make idiomatic, let alone legal, sense, but the expression “and, as the case may be, or” appears THIURTY-THREE times in the AIFMD implementing regulations. Our best guess is that this is simply a novel, frightful, way of articulating the already gruesome expression “and/or” — one about which the JC can scarcely complain, having noted before how logically impossible is the slash at the heart of “and/or”.

So the European Commission’s crack drafting squad have taken out the Slash and replaced it with “as the case may be”:

“and, as the case may be, or”.

This is black-belt stuff, gang: Nested flannel. A flannelette phase, (one already displaying a keening want of ontological certainty) embedded in another flannelette phrase that also displays profound ontological uncertainty.

Breath taken. There’s a portal to the fourth dimension right there. An information superhighway direct to the boredom heat-death of the universe.

By another immutable law of the universe, the number of slashes must remain constant. So if the ECCDS have taken out thirty three of the blighters, they must appear somewhere else, perhaps small, tiny, curled up into another dimension, but they are there. They must be. I wonder where.