Free Why Do Pirates Love Parrots? by David Feldman Page B

biz are cool enough to let them bask in their nakedness. But let the lawyers, financial titans, and technical writers and editors get involved, and weirdness ensues. Englishman Guy Chapman, who has seen a technical manual or two in his days in the computer industry, wrote a perfect preamble to this Imponderable:
     
         “This Page Intentionally Left Blank” could be one of the oddest sentences in the English language. Found in instruction manuals around the world, it indicates that the page on which it appears has been purposely left empty of words or pictures. But once this phrase has been printed on the page, the page is no longer blank; in fact, it is intentionally not blank. Therefore, this statement is only correct when it has not yet been made. Once it is written down, it is instantly wrong. By virtue of self-reference, the phrase is denying its own existence and contradicts itself. The only known phrase that is more confusing is “This is a lie.”
     
     
    There are slight variations to the wording. Every writing teacher tells students to make their writing punchier by using more verbs and fewer adjectives and adverbs. Some choose to transform the dowdy “This Page Intentionally Left Blank” to the downright adventurous and sinewy, “This Page Is Intentionally Left Blank.” Chapman found one manual writer who was so chagrined at the thought of the TPILB paradox that the bereft page was marked with “The page on which this statement has been printed has been intentionally left such that this statement is the only statement printed on it.” That writer, evidently, was paid by the word.
    Reader Harvey Kleinman opened up the prospectus for a mutual fund, Vanguard Windsor II, and realized that the last page (not the cover or inside back page) contained these magic five words. He noted that just as books are not printed on individual sheets but on larger collections of eight, sixteen, or thirty-two pages, the prospectus was a folded four-sided piece of paper. Because the prospectus is a legal document, which must be issued to investors, it wasn’t the right venue to casually insert an advertisement for other funds, a random illustration, or a photo of Catherine Zeta-Jones. As Chapman points out, in some instruction booklets, you will find “Notes” as a header on otherwise empty pages, which makes it look like the producer cares enough about you to provide you with a writing area, when in fact it is to hide the embarrassment of a naked page.
    TPILBs have been found in a myriad of documents. Let’s look at some of them, and find out why they appear:
     
     
     
    Legal Documents: Let’s say you are an associate at a big law firm, assembling a lengthy brief (oxymoron intended) full of documentation to support your case. You paginate these hundreds of documents and then at two in the morning, your managing partner calls and barks: “You know that Perlman affidavit? Yank it!” You follow orders, but what do you do with what are now incorrectly numbered pages? Before computerization, repaginating was a nightmare—now it is easier. But according to the lawyers we consulted, it is wiser to insert a TPILB than to try to repaginate, and not just because of the time wasted or the drudgery of reworking the numbers. According to Ed Swanson, an attorney in Los Angeles specializing in corporate and securities law, a lawyer has to worry about the accuracy of every cross-reference and page citation throughout the document.
    Swanson mentions that in documents that require signatures, lawyers usually want all the signatures to be on the same page, and separate from other material. Or they might want to highlight a particular heading or caption. Depending upon the length of the material preceding it, the important material might best be accentuated by having an empty page preceding it—time to drag out the trusty TPILB—or sometimes just an “Intentionally Left Blank,” if most but not all of a page is empty. Why