The craziest law ever was voted in Scotland and it still applies. I’m not sure if anyone could possibly understand it, but let’s give it a try.
The law reads like this (verbatim)
“In Nuts, (other ground nuts), Order, the expression “nuts” shall have reference to such nuts, other than ground nuts, as would but for this amending Order not qualify as nuts (underground) (other than ground nuts) by reason of their being nuts (underground).”
OK, I’ll let you take a moment; maybe read it a second time. As for myself, I took an hour and read it again and again, till the words lost any bit of meaning. I assume you read it again. And I bet you felt like a Lewis Carroll character, trying to get something to drink at an endless tea party.
Probably I’m wrong, but I’m tempted to read the law like this:
The (underground) nuts (other than ground nuts) shall be calles “nuts”; respectively, the ground nuts shal be called “ground nuts”.
The crazy thing about this law is that it establishes a grammatical rule, in the Wittgensteinian sense of “grammar”. We refer to the nuts by the means of the word “nuts”, and this is just so; we don’t need a law to tell us such thing. The law is tautological, and hence absurd.
But, as one might suspect, it’s very probable that the manner i read the las was wrong. Once again, we find ourselves helpless when facing a juridic text.
source: The Guinness Book of Record
— scris de gavagai