User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-1451563-20180913002703/@comment-24894325-20180929181507

To add my two cents to your textual analysis. At some point I realised that quite a few experienced DW writers excel at writing things that, on the one hand, are easily interpreted and understood when first uttered, but on the other hand, would not strictly speaking contradict almost anything that future writers might decide to do. Perhaps, part of the reason is the infamous UNIT dating controversy, which taught everyone the value of being non-committal. To give an example, did you notice how evasive the Doctor has always been about his age? This evasiveness ensures that there is no problem to slot more stories in between existing ones, stories that may take hundreds of years of the Doctor's personal time (e.g., Orbis).

What it means for us, editors, is that sometimes we are trying very hard to divine the exact meaning of phrases that have been specifically designed not to have one.