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 AIFMD implementing regulations contain the string “and, as the case may be, or” thirty-three times.

O, whoreson Slash

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”.

This drafting pedantry is so so committed to the craft; so heroic that it would be churlish to observe you could have got what you came for with a simple “or”. So let’s park that and just revel in it.

“and, as the case may be, or”.

For firstly, it doesn’t even make sense, and for a reason that gives away the paradoxical black hole at the heart of the and/or galaxy.

It should, strictly speaking, 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 your “as the case may be”. You might fix that with a cheeky slash — is there any other kind — thus: “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 lexical 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 European Commission’s crack drafting squad™ have taken out thirty three of the blighters, they must be somewhere else. Perhaps small, tiny, curled up into another space-tedium dimension, but somewhere, there are thirty three extraneous slashes. There must be.

I wonder where. A Nobel prize, surely, awaits those who find them.