The silver bullet of planning applications, the viability appraisal explains, through impenetrable pages of spreadsheets and fastidious appendixes, exactly how a project stacks up financially.
In the dense, often impenetrable, pages of the guide to playing in France, one of the more fanciful chapters is devoted to "gaining a bonus point by scoring four tries".
Many of its references are now completely impenetrable; on each page footnotes appear to be multiplying.
The most pervasive authority over the institution is not the Constitution or the Bible but, rather, an impenetrable sixteen-hundred-page tome, by Floyd M. Riddick, called "Senate Procedure: Precedents and Practices," which only the late Robert Byrd, of West Virginia, was known to have read in its entirety.
The plan Bill Clinton took to Congress then, running to more than 1,000 pages of impenetrable new regulations, wasn't what you'd call politically savvy, but the strategy used to sell it was even worse.
The chairman of the US body probing the causes of the financial crisis accused Goldman of "mischief-making" by delivering billions of pages of impenetrable information instead of the answers requested about its involvement in toxic derivatives, securities and market-making.
That means seeing what things actually do, not saying, "Look, here's 30 pages of impenetrable formulas and algorithms, so you make your own risk decision". Or, more likely, "Sorry, that's proprietary and you'll have to take our word for it because of competitive concerns". It means not allowing special interests to dismantle Dodd-Frank and consumer protections.
Each document only took me about 15 minutes to read (or, if I'm honest, to skim-read), but I still spent well over eight hours of the week just sitting reading page after page of dry, impenetrable prose.
We have learned that the borders of our great country are not impenetrable to evil (front page, Sept. 19).
The changes to the bankruptcy bill, to take that example (but there have been other changes) -- the bill was 1,100 pages long of impenetrable text, and it was deliberately written in a way that if you weren't a specialist -- look, I'm a professor of law at Harvard, I've taught this stuff now for more than twenty years.
They also manage to make powerful what looks on the page like an impenetrable script, with jumps in action, and speeches in German and Spanish.
