A lot of the langauge in the Specs and NEC are due to the excessive quantities of "barracks lawyers" out there.
Remember when we didn't get into arguments about 'bathrooms' vs. 'powder rooms'?
Remember when everyone knew what a 'building' was?
A couple of years ago at an IAEI conference, the speaker said that he was trying to write a definition for a kitchen so people wouldn't be able to get around it by playing word games.
He said that when his wife found out what he had been working so hard on, her only comment was "just how stupid are these people?"
I have an old Spec book from when my uncle had an business building put up in the early 1900's. The Specs (including signatures) was 23 pages.
This worked because it was able to spec the plumbing with "use all quality fixtures" instead of taking 8 pages to describe the detailed workings of a toilet.
It was pointed out to me once upon a time just how odd it was that entire civilizations can be run with 10 Commandments, but it takes 500 pages to run a parking lot.
