American bacon drafting: Difference between revisions

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 The legal equivalent of slapstick comedy: legal drafting created not so much to ''do'' anything but to ''be'' something.
-So named not because of its necessary provenance from [[U.S. Attorney|American]] [[legal eagles]] — though they do tend to be good at it — but because it resembles, by [[metaphor]], the sort of so-called “bacon” they sell you in America.
+“American bacon drafting” is the sort of wording that makes an incoming contract ''look'' hefty — even fearsome — but which, upon first contact with the pan, dissolves into a disappointing shrunken salty husk, swimming in a sea of tepid grease.
-Any foreigner will recall the cycle of disappointment and grief they went through at their first ''Breakfast In America'' when they watched local bacon cook for the first time. and that was before they gave you chalk to put in your coffee.
+It is so named not because of its necessary provenance from [[U.S. Attorney|American]] [[legal eagles]] — though they do tend to be good at it — but because it resembles, by [[metaphor]], the sort of so-called “bacon” they sell you in America.
-“American bacon drafting” is the sort of wording that makes an incoming contract look hefty — even fearsome — but which, upon first contact with the pan, dissolves into a disappointing shrunken salty husk swimming in a sea of tepid grease.
+Any foreigner will know the cycle of disappointment and grief you go through at your first American breakfast, watching in fascinated horror at the gruesome spectacle: you have these pale waxen strips of stuff they assure you is bacon, and as it hits the pan, it vanishes before your disbelieving eyes. And then they give you chalk to put in your coffee.
-I mean no disrespect to my American friends: only your bacon. We have a worked example from a real life contract below. Observers will note that when you do boil it down to its constituents, they go without saying in the first place. This is the rule rather than the exception in “American bacon drafting”.
+Now we mean no disrespect to our dear American friends: only your bacon.
+We have a worked example, from a real life contract, below. Observers will note that when you do boil it down to its constituents, they  tend to go without saying in the first place.
+The real trick is ensuring this can only ever become clear in the capable hands of a fellow [[legal eagle]]. God forbid your clients could ever work it out.
+===Correspondence===
+We have already heard from our American correspondents on this topic.
+“Is this not to unfairly malign our bacon?” one asks. “Do you not perhaps mean ‘spinach’?”
+Oh, no, it is your bacon. American bacon isn’t “bacon”. It is a ''fraud'' on the idea of bacon.
+The thing about spinach is that most right-thinking people ''want'' spinach to disappear. The smaller spinach becomes before before you have to eat it, the better. One takes spinach as one does cod liver oil: out of the conviction that it is, in some astral way, doing some part of your physiognomy — or soul, or part of your being to which your conscious self has no access at all — some ''good''. Enough to offset the visceral displeasure involved in earning that virtue.<ref>I should mention that the [[JC]] is quite partial to spinach.  But he speaks, as always, not for himself but for the great silent mass of his readership.</ref>
+This is emphatically not so for bacon. Quite the opposite, in fact.
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 *[[U.S. Attorney]]
 *[[Boilerplate]]
+*[[Signal versus noise]]
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