Clarification 707a-Δ

Clarification 707a-Δ is a forty-one-page instrument of the Board of Concordant Interpretation issued to resolve whether a Clarification may be clarified by the Clarification it clarifies. It was adopted on the eleventh of Fell, in the year the Tower keeps as 6,104 by the interior count, and is chiefly remembered not for its ruling, which was inconclusive, but for the three supplementary annexes it generated, which were. It is filed in the Delta series immediately after Clarification 44-Z, to which it makes eleven separate cross-references without once naming it.

Origin and reference

The Clarification arose from the so-called Hollis Complaint, filed in the winter of the preceding year by a stair-clerk of the forty-second floor who disputed whether a special allowance of three lamplight-hours, granted "to her and her Clarifications," extended to the annexes of those Clarifications. The Office of Onomastic Clarification reviewed the Complaint twice and returned it both times marked not a matter of names. It was the Petition for Clarification lodged in the same bundle that brought the question before the Board, and the Board, having already sat on the Complaint for a season without reading it, consolidated the two.

The preamble of 707a-Δ is unusually defensive, acknowledging that the instrument "touches upon the practice of clarification itself, and is therefore to be read once by the Board, twice by the Committee of Concordant Reconciliation, and not at all by the floor from which the Complaint arose" (Clarification 707a-Δ, Preamble, cl. 3). An early recension — the only one to survive without the Delta suffix — lacks this clause entirely, a discrepancy the Contextual Clarification Bulletins later attributed to "a copyist working from memory in a cold room."

The ruling and its three annexes

The operative text declines to resolve the question put to it. Clause 7 provides that where a Clarification and its annexes cannot be distinguished for the purposes of an allowance, "the allowance shall be divided equally among them, and any remainder held in trust against the next clarification of the same subject." The Board appended three annexes to explain what this meant. Annex A established that a Clarification may be reopened only at the circling of the seventh bell; Annex B set out who might circle it; Annex C, which is longer than Annexes A and B combined, set out what to do if the bell had already been circled for a different Clarification that morning. No annex explains the division of the allowance.

The Committee invoked its authority under Amendment 9-d to issue the third annex separately, so that Annex C has circulated in some scriptoria as an instrument in its own right. The Seventy-Seventh Clarification is commonly cited as the precedent for this manoeuvre, though the Committee has never confirmed the comparison, and Third Clarification on Non-Existent Affects is cited in the margin of Annex C without explanation.

Scholarly disagreement

Whether 707a-Δ is properly a Clarification at all is disputed. The Declaration of Clarification Clarification 17-C was catalogued by the Office of Onomastic Clarification in advance of issue and never issued, and the Office has since maintained that 707a-Δ occupies the void left by that omission — that it is, in the Office's phrase, "a clarification standing in the doorway of another." The Board rejects this reading, holding that the Delta suffix denotes the fourth instrument of the a-series and nothing more.

"The Delta is a mark of sequence, not of succession. That an earlier Clarification was withdrawn is a matter for the archive, not for the interpretation of Clause 7."

— Clarification 44-Z, Annex 2, note 9

Against this, the Committee of Concordant Reconciliation has quietly pointed out that the instrument immediately preceding 707a-Δ in the register is Temporary Clarification 707a-Γ, which was issued for a term not yet expired, and that no 707a-Δ can lawfully be numbered beneath it. The point has not been raised in writing, and the Board has not noticed it.

Reception and effect

The Clarification has produced at least six petitions seeking its own clarification, five of which were refused on the ground that the petitioning floors had mistaken an allowance for a name. Only one was read. A stair-clerk of the nineteenth floor, one Vance of the upper landings, obtained leave under the Anticipatory Clarification mechanism to ask, in advance, whether the clarifications of a Clarification counted against its annexes. The Board answered that this was not a proper question in advance, and that he should ask it again after the allowance had been spent. He did. The result, the Clarification on Radial Terminology, concerns the spelling of landings and does not address his question.

The Delta division rule has since been adopted by the Concordance on lamplight allowances and by two guilds of the lower floors as a model for dividing anything that will not divide. It is not used on the forty-second floor, where clerks divide the allowance by floor and the annexes by sight.