June 25, 2004

Post intentionally left empty

Posted by Chris

Post intentionally left empty.

Well, not quite.1 But as I was perusing Font Requirements for Next Generation Air Traffic Management (a pdf document I happened upon after googling for something quite different) I came upon several pages bearing the words:

Page intentionally left blank.

Which, of course, it wasn’t. There must be many examples of such self-defeating performatives.

1 On “quite” see below .

Posted on June 25, 2004 02:44 PM UTC
Comments

How about, “No comment”?

Posted by Poppy McCool · June 25, 2004 02:59 PM

Errata:
For ‘errata’, read ‘erratum’.

Posted by Sam Dodsworth · June 25, 2004 03:27 PM

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.

Posted by Barry · June 25, 2004 03:34 PM

Nice to see the intelligensia have picked up on this ancient chuckle of the gainfully employed.

Posted by Dick Thompson · June 25, 2004 03:34 PM

Expression intentionally left blank.

Posted by Rory · June 25, 2004 03:37 PM

I believe it was IBM who pioneered this. It was a wellworn joke among some computer geek circles in the eighties (and probably earlier.)

Posted by ucblockhead · June 25, 2004 03:39 PM

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!

Posted by Jim Henley · June 25, 2004 03:54 PM

The best version of this that I’ve seen was in Alisdair Gray’s “Unlikely Stories Mostly,” which had an erratum slip inserted, “”Erratum: This slip has been inserted by mistake”

Posted by Henry · June 25, 2004 03:59 PM

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

Posted by q · June 25, 2004 04:14 PM

Forgive my deixis.

Posted by Amardeep · June 25, 2004 04:36 PM

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

One classic was;

“Do not throw stones at this sign”

Posted by Matthew · June 25, 2004 04:49 PM

Which seems to have been a stupid prank. Ah..google…the source of all that is good and bad in life.

http://www.xs4all.nl/~ellman/ae-a/aaardvark/things/flyer94.html

Posted by matthew · June 25, 2004 04:52 PM

“I don’t think.”

“I don’t say.”

“I don’t exist.”

Posted by q · June 25, 2004 05:30 PM

I always marveled at smilar pages on the SAT that said, “No Test Material on this Page.” This was back when the test was administered on actual paper. Alas, my children and my chidren’s children will take such tests on computer, and never know the joys of thouroughly sincere postmodernism.

Posted by Keith · June 25, 2004 06:03 PM

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.”

Posted by double-plus-ungood · June 25, 2004 07:05 PM

I think it would be even more disconcerting to read “Page unintentionally left blank”

Posted by Richter · June 25, 2004 07:43 PM

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

Posted by novalis · June 25, 2004 08:24 PM

“Do not write in this space.
Okay
.”
with the result that Lisa lost her beauty queen crown.

And then there’s the lovely phrase, “not to mention…”

Posted by dan · June 25, 2004 09:41 PM

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.”

Posted by Matt Weiner · June 25, 2004 10:04 PM

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.”

Posted by Matt Weiner · June 25, 2004 10:04 PM

Ritual apology for double-posting.

Posted by Matt Weiner · June 25, 2004 10:06 PM

Ritual comment that apologizing for double-posting only creates more unnecessary postage (and ritual comment that why doesn’t mt detect that, anyway?)

Posted by novalis · June 25, 2004 11:21 PM

I still don’t understand deixis.

Posted by Hedley Lamarr · June 25, 2004 11:35 PM

“Alas, my children and my chidren’s children will take such tests on computer, and never know the joys of thouroughly sincere postmodernism.”

Is the irony of expressing nostalgia for something called “postmodernism” too retro for the kids these days?

Posted by Decnavda · June 26, 2004 12:00 AM

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.

Posted by Matt Weiner · June 26, 2004 12:01 AM

Any accounting report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission will have a few of such pages. They are required by law.

Although superficially silly, the reason for “This page intentionally blank” is to distinguish such pages from any which were unintentionally blank … the result of printer’s errors.

A completely blank page would alert the reader to the fact that he is reading a mechanically flawed report.

Posted by Jamesg · June 27, 2004 04:55 PM

I left this blank unintentionally.

Posted by Tom Doyle · June 29, 2004 03:02 AM
Followups

This discussion has been closed. Thanks to everyone who contributed.