Concordance 117, Clause 4

Concordance 117, Clause 4 is the operative clause of the hundred-and-seventeenth Concordance, and the Tower's principal instrument governing the registration of names that have been used before. It is a short clause — forty-one words in the recension currently posted on the Fourth Spiral — and it has generated, by the Librarians' own accounting, more annex material than any clause except Clause 4 of the Seventh. Its full text, as restored at the Reclamation Desk, reads: "A name once entered shall not be entered again in a different hand. Where a hand is disputed, the entry stands and the dispute is filed beneath it."

Origin and the Naming Season of F.3,411

The clause was drafted in the winter following the naming crisis on Floor 3,411, when three separate cataloguing parties arrived at the same apartment with three separate subjects and the same name. Each party held a valid warrant. Each refused to yield, on the grounds that a warrant is a warrant. The standoff lasted nineteen days and was resolved only when a Librarian of the Order of the Quiet Margin — the record gives the name as Sephra ul-Marn, though the roll of that year spells it otherwise — ruled that all three entries should stand and that the matter of which hand wrote first was "a question for the floor, not for the door".

Concordance 117 was promulgated the following spring. Clause 4 is its fourth clause and, by most readings, its only substantive one; Clauses 1 through 3 concern the seal, the paper stock, and the correct way to fold a clause that has been amended in place. Clause 5 was withdrawn before ratification and is not reprinted in the working editions.

The Hand Dispute

The difficulty, recognised within a decade, is that the clause distinguishes between names and hands and says nothing about either. A name is what the subject is called. A hand is who wrote it down. The clause forbids entering a name "in a different hand", which the scriptoria of the Second Spiral read as a prohibition on re-entry by any clerk other than the original, and the Office of Continuing Entry read as a prohibition only on re-entry by a clerk the subject has not personally met.

"The clause protects the entry, not the name, and it protects the entry from clerks, not from subjects, who are not hands and cannot be."

— Memorandum of the Office of Continuing Entry, appended to Concordance 89, Clause 14

This reading was provisionally accepted under the superseded guidelines of Third Concordance, Clause VII, which Concordance 12, Clause 7 formally set aside along with the other provisional definitions. The Office has continued to act on it regardless. When challenged, its clerks cite Third Concordance, Clause 19, the Clause of Standing Adjustments, which permits an office to retain a superseded reading for so long as no one has filed a contrary entry. No one has.

The Filing Beneath

The second sentence of the clause — that a disputed entry "stands" and that the dispute is "filed beneath it" — created the practice known as underfiling, in which objections, counter-objections, and occasionally entire rival catalogues are stored in the cabinet space directly below the entry they contest. On Floor 17,208 the underfiling beneath a single disputed name reached eleven drawers before the cabinet was condemned and the whole stack transferred to Ceremonial Inks for pulping. The pulping was halted by writ; the drawers remain in the Inks annex and may be consulted with a written request and a spotter.

Underfiling is not a form of appeal. Nothing filed beneath an entry alters the entry, and the Librarians have declined four times to say whether an unread dispute is still a dispute. Concordance 47, Clause 9, the shortest clause in that document, addresses the question in its entirety with the words "It is."

Relationship to the Thirteenth Concordance

Concordance 117, Clause 4 is frequently and wrongly cited in matters of volitional voids. The confusion arises from a shared phrase: Clause 4 speaks of a name "once entered", while Clause 19γ speaks of a name "once entered and since withdrawn". The latter governs. A withdrawn name is not held by Clause 4 and may be re-entered freely, which is why the withdrawal registers on the Eighth Spiral are consulted by more clerks than any other floor's holdings, and why the queue at that aperture is longest in the two weeks before each quarterly closing.

Two amendments have been attempted. The first, offered by the scriptorium of the Fifth in the year F.3,472, would have extended the clause to nicknames; it failed on the third reading by a margin of one. The second, a maintenance rider in the style of Temporary Maintenance Clause 882, would have permitted the transfer of underfiled disputes to the floor of origin; it passed and was never implemented, and the rider is still taped inside the working copy at the Reclamation Desk.

Current Standing

Clause 4 remains in force and is read aloud at the opening of every naming session, a practice dating from the Third and not required by any document. Clerks are asked to hold their hands still while it is read. The reading takes under a minute.

See also the working recension, Concordance 7, Revision 4, Clause 19, and Seventh Concordance, Annex D, Clause 1.