An interesting feature about a lot of ancient and medieval stories is how much loopholes play a part in their narratives. I remember a film adaptation of Jason and the Argonauts where the goddess allowed him three answers to any questions and Jason asked if the golden fleece exists and if so, where is it. The goddess then said, I will answer both questions with one answer: it is at Colhis.
Even as late as Shakespeare we can see this in the prophecies of the three sisters which were all technically correct but which did not meet the expectations of Macbeth. The most famous instance of this is in Lord of the Rings when the Lord of the Nazgûl declared the prophecy that "no man may kill me" and Éowyn replied, "I am no man", which is technically true even if it goes against our expectation that "man" is supposed to cover both sexes. There was a medieval tale, I think it was Tristan and Iseult, where Iseult was suppose to swear an oath that she was chaste. So their scheme was that the oath would take place in an open soggy field, and when Iseult complained that she could not cross it, Tristan in disguise would offer to piggy back her across it. Finally when she arrived she placed her hand on the sacred relics and swore that "no man has been between my legs except the man who just carried me." There was the ancient expectation that oaths and words were sacred and that one could not lie to God, nor would it do to pervert the meaning of words. Thus what they could do is to simply exploit loopholes and phrase it in a way which is truthful, preserves the integrity of words, while defying expectations. In the television adaption of Sharpe, who was an English officer in the 95th Rifles during Wellington's campaign in Spain, was supposed to take an oath before Wellington that he would not attempt to take a French eagle as asked by a dying officer. Sharpe, even though not particularly pious, still carefully worded his oath to say, "No one heard me make any promise concerning a French imperial eagle."
I remember an episode of Justice Bao where the emperor's real mother, who was wrongfully displaced by a usurper, wanted him to punish the emperor for filial impiety, but emperors cannot be beaten, so since the emperor's robe was the emperor in "person", Bao Gong just had the robe beaten instead. Such examples are staple in a lot of medieval and ancient literature.
I remember when I was younger reading these I would be like, well, that's cheating! EVERYONE KNOWS what we "really" mean and intend by those words. But now that I am older, it is not really that the ancients were trying to be clever, it reflected the older view of the world where words were sacred objects which transcends human will. We have to work with them and we cannot subject them to our will and intentions. While obviously we craft prose and statements, they have their own independent meaning which are not infinitely plastic in our hands. We build cars to be sure, we have to however build them respecting the laws of physics or it will malfunction or blow up in our faces.
But at some point in the modern age, words lost as it were its potency, rather than paying attention to the objective referents of the text, we dismiss the text to get at what people intended or what people want, which becomes all important. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that there is a line from the decline of the ability to appreciate a good loophole and the current fad to subject the definitions of men and women to our arbitrary whims. Words, especially loopholes, no longer can frustrate our subjective expectations anymore, we have completely tamed it and made them our slaves.
But if words are our slaves, how can we be ruled or governed by laws which are just words? Thus we experience now the serious consequences of this train of thought.