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, is “perceptible by touch”. Now the substrate in which writing was traditionally embedded, paper, is assuredly tangible. Unless your writing is braille, or so expensively embossed that one can detect letters when one brushes ones fingers over the onionskin, writing is not tangible. Certainly not when, as most writing in these moderns times is, not embedded in a physical substrate, but represented by the orientation of a liquid crystal between two perpendicular polarising elements on an LED display. Writing is not tangible at all. Information isn't tangible. It is an abstract concatenation of binary values.

So hard lines on your confi, that is to say if you have restricted it to “tangible” forms of information.

See also

• Substrate
• Tangible or intangible