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-It is a founding premise of legal inquiry that one does not waste words: parties who have gone to the trouble of inserting words, must have ''meant'' something by them.
+It is a founding premise of legal inquiry that one does not waste words: words one has gone to the trouble of inserting, one must ''mean'' something by.
-Counter-examples are legion, of course, but of all the vacuities a [[legal eagle]] can commit to a page – one hopes readers of this site by now will be persuaded there are many – none is quite so pointless as this:
+Counter-examples are legion, of course, but of all the vacuities a [[legal eagle]] can commit to a page, none is quite so pointless as this:
 “[[This page is intentionally left blank]]”.
-Beyond dispensing with the imaginative contention<ref>“imaginative” not being a quality on which the law looks fondly.</ref> that there might be writing on it that you just can’t see, it is hard to see what this achieves.
+Beyond dispensing with the concern that there might be writing on it that you just can’t see, what could this mean?
-We resort to guessing.
+Should we differentiate a ''wantonly'' blank page from one whose lack of content arose from a weaker mental conviction? Might the author have been merely reckless<ref>in that the author apprehended the risk the page would be bare and took it anyway.</ref> or negligent<ref> in that a reasonable person in the author’s position would have realised there was a risk the page would be blank</ref>? or could it have been blameless inadvertence, the redundant page being overlooked through no cognitive operation, actual or constructive, on the author’s part at all?
-Does it differentiate a wantonly blank page, perhaps, from one whose lack of content arose from a weaker mental conviction? Might the author have been merely reckless<ref>in that the author apprehended the risk the page would be bare and took it anyway.</ref> or negligent<ref> in that a reasonable person in the author’s position would have realised there was a risk the page would be blank</ref>? or could it have been blameless inadvertence, the redundant page being overlooked through no cognitive operation, actual or constructive, on the author’s part at all?
 Agonising over the writer’s mens rea obscures the real question: WHO CARES? What difference does it make why a page is blank? It is blank: that is an existential fact<ref>Or is it? See below.</ref>.