Comment by ajani

Rules, if taken as written, are never clear.

Try to define "furniture". You may say "Something to sit on". But what about a table. Ok, something to keep things on. But then is a soap dish furniture?

Furniture is a concept. It has fuzzy boundaries of meaning. And the meaning is only ever clear in context. And context is not just what is said alongside the concept. It is also the exchange itself in a particular situation.

When 14 years olds play ball in a "garden" area of a park, it's clearly disruptive. It can hurt someone, destroy the foliage etc. But when you play ball with a couple of 4 year olds in a garden, no one will suggest you stop. It is understood that a 4 year old in a play area with teenagers is at risk of being harmed, and so better to keep them in the garden area.

Rules, and the standardization of some of them into a system of law is problematic only if taken literally. As long as the what is written is understood to be a scaffold for actual meaning derivation from context there is no problem. This is the reason why judges, juries and courts exist - to interpret the law. And in the absence of formalization or systematization, common law applies. And at a very simplified level, common law is mostly common sense. Common as in shared among many. Common sense as in the sense and meaning shared among most of us implicitly.