Tangible

The Jolly Contrarian’s Glossary The snippy guide to financial services lingo.™ Go Premium Index — Click the ᐅ to expand: Glossary Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

Spotted in the wild:

“Confidential Information means all and any information disclosed by either Party to the other Party, whether in writing or other tangible form, in any way relating or pertaining to the disclosing party...”

“Tangible”, so the internets tell us, means “perceptible by touch”. Now the substrate in which writing was traditionally embedded — paper — is assuredly tangible. But, unless your writing is braille, or so expensively embossed that one can detect the letters when one brushes one’s fingers over the onionskin, writing is not tangible. Certainly not when, as is common in these dark modern times, writing is not embedded in a physical substrate at all, but represented by the orientation of millions of liquid crystals between perpendicular polarising elements on an LED display. Writing is information. Information is an abstract concatenation of binary values. It has no physical dimension. You can’t touch it. Indeed the digital revolution through which we are living, loving and relentlessly bullshitting on LinkedIn dates back to the moment, in the early 19th Century, when Monsieur Jacquard figured out how to perform that exact abstraction.

So, hard lines if, when hammering-out that confi you sagely restricted it to “tangible” forms of information.

See also

• Substrate
• Jacquard loom