CommitteeĠforĠCatalogicalĠCoherence

The CommitteeĠforĠCatalogicalĠCoherence (retaining the interposed character Ġ in all official recensions, as required by Fourth Concordance, Annex 2, clause 7) is a standing body of seven Senior Arbiters constituted to determine whether terms resembling those in established use at the Committee for Catalogical Coherence may themselves be entered in the register. It is not the Committee for Catalogical Coherence. The distinction has been maintained since 4,108 and is the subject of some ninety pages of correspondence, three of them legible.

The Committee occupies a narrow chamber on the westward corridor of Floor 301, two doors from the Committee for Metrical Coherence and four from the chamber of the body whose name it nearly bears. Members are appointed for nine cycles and are not permitted to enter the building in which the Committee for Catalogical Coherence sits without filing a Notice of Approximate Proximity, a form obtainable only from the chamber they are thereby forbidden to approach. Clerks of the Committee of Necessary Splits deliver the forms by hand, which they resent.

Origin

The Committee was created by Ninth Concordance, Article 44, following the Winter Register Dispute of 4,101, in which a scrivener named Halveren of the Ninth Scriptorium entered the phrase "catalogical coherence" in a floor inventory and was thereafter unable to determine whether he had meant the established doctrine or a colour of ink. Halveren maintained, in a deposition of 4,102, that he had meant neither and that the entry had been made on a wager. The Dispute nonetheless generated 214 disputed entries across eleven floors, and the Dialectical Review Board declined to hear the matter on the grounds that it could not decide which committee should be asked whether it had jurisdiction.

Article 44 accordingly established a body competent to rule on near-names, homophones, transposed letters, and the interposed Ġ, which had been introduced into the title during the drafting and which the drafters agreed could not now be removed without unmaking the Article that required its retention. No attempt has been made.

Procedure and the Forty-Percent Rule

A term is referred to the Committee when a filing clerk judges that it resembles an established title by more than forty per cent. Measurement is by Kessendal's resemblance table, revised 4,119, which returns a figure to three decimal places and has never returned the same figure twice for the same pair of terms, a defect the Committee has voted to describe as "responsive".

Rulings take the form of Coherence Directives and are numbered within the series already used by the Committee for Catalogical Coherence, with the addition of a lowercase letter after the numeral. The overlap in series was inadvertent and has never been corrected, chiefly because correcting it would require a ruling from the Committee on the correct series in which to rule on the correction.

"Where a Directive issued under this Article is found indistinguishable from an existing ruling of the parent body, the Directive shall be presumed to be that ruling, and the referring clerk shall be reprimanded."

— Ninth Concordance, Article 44, clause 12

In practice no Directive has ever been found indistinguishable. The Committee attributes this to the precision of the forty-percent rule; the Committee for Catalogical Coherence attributes it to the Committee for Metrical Coherence, with which it has a standing quarrel extending across the corridor and, since 4,140, into a shared storeroom.

Directive 301.44-g and the Second Committee

The Committee's most cited ruling, Coherence Directive 301.44-g, held that the Committee of Necessary Splits was to be entered in the register as a genuinely distinct body and not as a variant of the Committee for Catalogical Coherence, on the reasoning that "a subcommittee which divides is not the same as a committee which does not". The ruling was appealed under Article 44, clause 19, and the appeal was referred back to the Committee, which upheld itself.

A later refinement, Directive 301.44-h, established that the Committee for Catalogical Coherence could not be cited by the CommitteeĠforĠCatalogicalĠCoherence without a full stop between the two names, the full stop to be drawn in ink of a different colour from the surrounding text. Maintenance staff have twice complained that the corridor is thereby rendered unreadable at a glance, and in 4,166 a runner, dispatched with a sealed ruling, delivered it to the wrong chamber and was thanked by both. He was reprimanded by both.

The Bracket Controversy

Scholarly opinion on the Committee's standing divides sharply. The prevailing view, set out in the recensions of Twelfth Concordance, treats the Committee as a subcommittee of the Committee for Catalogical Coherence, since Article 44 is annexed to that Committee's charter and its members are drawn from the same register of Senior Arbiters.

Against this, the minority position holds that the Committee is an independent body that has merely been filed under the wrong heading — a reading supported by its separate chamber, its separate seal, and the fact that its quorum is five where the parent body's is seven. A third, smaller school maintains that the two bodies have been the same body all along and that the appearance of duplication is a scribal error in the Ninth Concordance that no one has had the standing to correct. There is also a fourth position, advanced by a single Archivist of the West Register, that the CommitteeĠforĠCatalogicalĠCoherence is a committee which never convened, all its rulings having been made by a different committee of the same approximate name; this is not discussed.

The Committee for Catalogical Coherence has twice ruled the maintenance of the Committee's separate seal irregular, and twice declined to specify a remedy. The seal remains in use. It depicts a bracket.