Boilerplate

It's the stuff waaaaayyyy down there. Take the standard form contract that everyone gets when they buy a washing machine. It says stuff like, uh…don’t throw your cat (or kid) in here. And if you do, that’s on you, pal...not us. Don’t plug a 110-volt line into a 220 volt receptacle. It’d be...shocking. And probably re-volting. If you bang it with a sledgehammer and damage it, well yeah, then that’s on you, too. These machines are here to wash your clothes, not to let you vent your...rage against the machine.

So if you slowly zooooom out and look, you’ll see this language...which is the standard, same language on almost every consumer contract like this...well, it looks like boilerplate. Literally.

Like...Google an actual boilerplate. Yeah. Eerily similar.

So why do we have the term? Well, it just refers to the notion that this set of caveats or warnings is pretty standard and on every contract of similar purchase, in the same way a boilerplate is used to make every boiler.

As for an actual boilerplate…good luck fitting that thing into your washing machine.