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How about, “No comment”?

This is common in government documents and many manuals. It’s used so that, when going between one-sided and two-sided copies, it’s clear that a page isn’t supposed to have information in it. This is good if you, like me, live in a world where copiers frequently do ‘interesting’ things to documents.

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For postmodernism in the real world, my favorite candidate is property signs that read “Posted.” Used to be the signs read “No Trespassing” or “No Hunting,” and once they were put up we referred to the land as “posted.” Now the referent collapses into the object, and in red states!

1759-1767: Lawrence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman has blank chapters in Volume 9 – chapters 18-19.

Notes & Queries in the Guardian once had an enjoyable focus on these.

One classic was;

“Do not throw stones at this sign”

“I don’t think.”

“I don’t say.”

“I don’t exist.”

When I was producing manuals at a software development company, the software development director insisted on “This Page Intentionally Left Blank” on pages that would otherwise be blank, over the strenuous objections from the technical writers that paradoxes of this sort were dangerous.

We eventually retaliated by insisting that the cardboard boxes used as filler inside the product box contain a slip of paper reading “This Box Intentionally Left Empty.”

My favourite along these lines was an old BC cartoon (when Johnny Hart was still funny) that had a sign saying “Please do not read this sign.”

The ultimate in silly self-reference games:
“This Is The Title Of This Story, Which Is Also Found Several Times In The Story Itself”, by David Moser

After some sort of atrocity or tragedy occurs, you occasionally see someone on one side of a bitter political dispute saying “At least people on our side have only expressed regret and sorrow over this, rather than trying to score political points.”

If you don’t understand what “deixis” (in amardeep’s comment) means, the following true story may help–I was sitting in a bar with fellow grad students who were discussing the sentence “Deixis presupposes anaphora.” “What’s deixis?” I asked. One of them pointed to a bottle on the table and said “That bottle.” (Well I suppose he said “‘That bottle'” but proper punctuation undermines the joke.)

Of course “TPILB” does make sense as Barry points out–what’s really going on here is akin to restriction of quantifier domains; it’s like saying “It is intentional that there is nothing on this page” where “nothing” means “nothing useful.”

Ritual apology for double-posting.

I still don’t understand deixis.

Hedley, Deixis is picking something out by pointing at it or by using a word like ‘this’, as my friend was doing when he said ‘this bottle’.

I see, having googled to check this, that me and my friends may have been using the word incorrectly–‘deixis’ may mean what I call ‘indexicality’ (referring by a term whose referent varies with context, including “I” or “Here” as well as “this”). Hm.

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