Clerk of Provisional Orthography

The Clerk of Provisional Orthography is the office charged with the interim rendering of names, floor-designations, and titles whose spelling has not yet been settled by the Third Concordance or its recensions. The office was created by the Orthographic Instrument of 1741 and has never been confirmed in perpetuity; its warrants are issued in twelve-year terms and renewed, as a rule, without reading. The present incumbent holds the sixty-fourth warrant. The Clerk maintains chambers on Floor 71, three landings below the Scriptorians of the Seventh Aperture, with whom the office has an arrangement concerning ink.

The Clerk's ordinary work is the issuance of provisional spellings — spellings held valid until a formal codification is entered elsewhere — together with the register of those spellings, known as the Provisional Roll. A name entered on the Roll may be used in ledgers, on door-plates, and in the citations of other offices. It may not be used in a Concordance. The distinction is the source of most of the office's difficulties and all of its correspondence.

Origins and the Instrument of 1741

Before the Instrument, unsettled names were carried in the margins of the Registry of Provisional Holdings, a practice that produced what the Instrument's preamble calls "marginal drift," in which a single subject acquired as many as nine concurrent spellings across adjacent floors. The Clerk of Provisional Holdings petitioned for relief in 1739 and received it two years later, on the condition that the new office confine itself to orthography and take no view on whether a thing existed. The Clerk of Provisional Orthography has honored that condition strictly. The office's seal bears the motto Littera tantum — the letter only.

The 1978 Ruling on Floor Ȣ

The office is best known for its ruling of 14 March 1978, which temporarily reclassified Floor Ȣ as a visual annex to Floor 71. The ruling arose from a dispute over the floor's numeral, which the Scriptorians of the Seventh Aperture had declined to cut into a lintel on the grounds that it "resembled an unfinished letter and would invite correction" (Seventh Aperture, Lintel Objections, vol. ii, fol. 118). Rather than rule on the numeral, the Clerk reclassified the floor, on the reasoning that an annex requires no lintel of its own. The reclassification was described as temporary. It has been renewed by each successive warrant and remains in force.

The ruling is frequently cited in the lower floors as authority for the proposition that a thing may be moved rather than named. The Clerk of the Threshold has objected to this reading in three separate memoranda, none of which the office has answered.

Controversy: the Third Concordance and the Eloise Recension

A longstanding disagreement concerns whether provisional spellings lapse upon codification or persist alongside it. The Third Concordance is silent on the question, but its orthographic codification — largely the work of Registrargeneral Eloise, whose hand is visible in the annexes and whose preferences in the matter of doubled consonants are reproduced without comment — is held by the office to supersede the Roll entirely. The Scribes' Guild of the Middle Floors holds the contrary view, that the Concords codify only what they name, and that a provisional spelling for anything unnamed survives codification indefinitely.

"What the Concordance has not spelled, it has not settled; and what it has not settled remains provisional, however long the provisional may endure."

— Scribes' Guild of the Middle Floors, Memorial to the Concordance Commission, 1904

The practical consequence is a class of designations — mostly stairwells, several of them on Floor 71 itself — whose spellings have been provisional since the eighteenth century and are likely to remain so. The Clerk has twice sought a ruling and twice been advised that the question is not yet ripe.

Working Relations

The office does not determine what a thing is called, only how the calling is written, and it enforces the distinction with some severity. In the winter of 1961 the Clerk returned an entire consignment of door-tags submitted by Clerk-Provisional Aris Thorn on the grounds that the designations had been "resolved beyond the office's competence" — that is, spelled as though settled. The tags were reissued with two letters struck and a marginal note. Clerk-Provisional Aris Thorn has since submitted all work to the office in draft.

The Clerk corresponds regularly with the Clerk of Eternal Recitation, whose recitations require an authoritative spelling for each name as it is spoken, and with Clerk Marlen Threnos, who has requested — and been refused — a standing provisional spelling for the word threshold, on the ground that a standing spelling is a settled one by another route.

Register and Access

The Provisional Roll is kept in eleven volumes, of which the fourth is missing and the seventh is a duplicate of the fourth. Access is granted to clerks of the first grade and above, on written application, between the hours of the second and fifth bell. Applicants are asked not to reshelve the Roll themselves; the volumes are shelved by warrant number rather than by date, and a mis-shelved volume has historically taken years to recover. A notice to this effect has hung at the chamber door since 1802 and has been amended four times, most recently to add the word please.

The office publishes nothing. Its rulings are entered in the Roll and are discoverable only by those who already know what they are looking for, a circumstance the Clerk has defended as "the natural condition of an interim arrangement" (Clerk of Provisional Orthography, Reply to the Aperture, 1979).