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NONSENSE, construction. That which in a written agreement or will is unintelligible.
     2. It is a rule of law that an instrument shall be so construed that the whole, if possible, shall stand. When a matter is written grammatically right, but it is unintelligible, and the whole makes nonsense, some words cannot be rejected to make sense of the rest; 1 Salk. 324; but when matter is nonsense by being contrary and repugnant to, some precedent sensible latter, such repugnant matter is rejected. Ib.; 15 Vin. Ab. 560; 14 Vin. Ab. 142. The maxim of the civil law on this subject agrees with this rule: Quae in testamento ita sunt scripta, ut intelligi non possent: perinde sunt, ac si scripta non essent. Dig. 50,17,73,3. Vide articles Ambiguity; Construction; Interpretation.
     3. In pleading, when matter is nonsense by being contradictory and repugnant to something precedent, the precedent matter, which is sense, shall not be defeated by the repugnancy which follows, but that which is contradictory shall be rejected; as in ejectment where the declaration is of a demise on the second day of January, and that the defendant postea scilicet, on the first of January, ejected him; here the scilicet may be rejected as being expressly contrary to the postea and the precedent matter. 5 East, 255; 1 Salk. 324.

References in periodicals archive ?
His proposition that prize-money is, or was, a function of supply and demand and therefore, we owners, who actually subsidise the industry, should accept the economic reality that reduced prize-money is inevitable in the current economic and just pay up, is patent nonsense.
Furthermore, the notion that Christian charity towards the poor should be purely voluntary--an idea that grew in popularity among some circles into the modern period--would have struck responsible patricians as well as much of the urban secular clergy of these early modern cities as patent nonsense.
It shares three words with this one (hatter, fleas, cool) but is patent nonsense while this one teasingly hints at saying something--about whether or not to supply hats to jumping marine parasites held captive inland?
He also expresses perhaps excessive alarm about some of the patent nonsense and disinformation published in some of the papers, in the process taking this obvious propaganda more seriously than would most Salvadoran readers.
This is patent nonsense, a fact Quinn made clear when he referred to the documents which had to be scrutinised by the Stock Exchange before that last cash raising exercise.
The proposition that none of the Chekhovian techniques "can be used in rehearsal and development of character unless 'radiation' (along with other elements) is first worked religiously" is patent nonsense.
In the Times, Felicity Barringer, who frequently writes about publishing, blandly assured us that "while the commercialization of the book business has been internalized by those who toil in it, industry experts say that commercialization is not incompatible with quality"--a comment for which no source or backup was given, and which is patent nonsense.
This is patent nonsense, considering that so many images here were grotesque renderings of the human body with a particular emphasis on its sexual parts.
The teaching of patent nonsense can't fail to have an impact on the next generation of thinkers and leaders.
Thus RBN is a strange mixture of profound thought and patent nonsense.
media, and force Ronald Reagan "to retreat into a 'steel cocoon"'--all patent nonsense.