Mark-up: Difference between revisions

Legal mark-up, being the fossil record of a legal [[negotiation]] between [[legal eagle]]s, bears a striking similarity to a playground argument. It will start as a broad, wide-ranging, harangue; each side adopting fundamentally opposed positions largely for the sake of it, yet summoning commendable outrage at the other’s position, notwithstanding it’s fundamental arbitrariness.  

The process of counter-sniping at idiotic, haughty positions has a cleansing effect. As the blinds, battlements and barricades are gradually shot away, leaving just the serial absurdities behind, each follows the same slow, careful process of reversing, the way one descends a rickety ladder, shouting gleefully, but with ebbing enthusiasm, as they go and by the bottom the debate has reduced  into petulant snickering: correcting split infinitives, interposing redundancies, clarifying the already plain, helpfully particularising the general and addending for the the satisfaction of having the last word{{strike||, and/or words, as the case may be}}

In the analogue days, mark-up found its voice in spidery handwritten annotations, balloons, glyphs and [[Rider|riders]] defacing carefully-typed pages of copy — hard enough to decrypt in their native form, and  then faxed between institutions, making it harder still.<ref>The process was not without its serendipities: the [[Biggs hoson]] was discovered this way.</ref> Since legal employers have discovered they can and ''should'' pay their lawyers to type after all — since that means they can dispense with legal secretaries and fax room attendants — the “manuscript mark-up” has given way to the more prosaic charmless business of running [[Redline|redlines]].