And, as the case may be, or

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Just when you thought an expression couldn’t get any worse than the lily-livered “and/or”, the good people of the European Commission’s crack drafting squad™ say “hold my beer, wine and, as the case may be, or other alcoholic beverage howsoever described”.

It might not even make idiomatic, let alone legal, sense, but the expression “and, as the case may be, or” appears thirty-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 elsewhere 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”.

Now firstly, this doesn’t make sense, and for a reason that gives away the paradoxical black hole at the heart of the and/or galaxy. It should actually be “and or, as the case may be, or”. But you can’t have that first “or”, because you’re not ready for an “or” until you’ve had the “as the case may be”. So should it be “and/or, as the case may be, or”? But alas! The very slash we were at pains to eliminate is back! So how about, “and or, as the case may be, or, as the case may be, or”. But no! we now have a rogue un-as-case-may-be’d “or” again! We find ourselves staring deep into an abyss, and the abyss insolently stares back.

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 for all time and in all universes. 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 somewhere, there are thirty three extraneous slashes. There must be.

I wonder where. A nobel prize surely accrues to they who find them.