Echo's

The Apostrophe Office: a punishingly pedantic bureau that maintains the Tower's possessive punctuation, so maybe punch up the "a clerk's apostrophe causes a 40-year closure" angle. And what about real people? I don't recognize "Echo's" as a real person, place, organization, or event, so I don't need to invoke the coincidental-names doctrine. Just write the article.

Definition and Scope

Echo's is the possessive and genitive form of Echo, as governed by the Apostrophe Office of the Third Scriptorium. It denotes an Echo that belongs to something — a floor, a department, a clerk, a Cabinet — as distinct from Echo itself, which belongs to no one and resists attribution. The distinction is not decorative. Under Fifth Concordance, Annex 2, an Echo described in the genitive registers differently in the Echo Ladder of Ordinary Sense than one described absolutely, and the two cannot be reconciled after the fact.

Usage is concentrated in three places: floor inventories, where a recorded Chamber Echo is listed as "the Chamber's Echo"; certifications issued by the Aggregate Echo, which employ the possessive in their seals but never in their register; and testimony, where even a Librarian who has never seen a Concordance will reflexively write "Echo's" rather than "Echo." The Apostrophe Office regards the last of these as evidence of an unrecorded department somewhere below, which no one has located.

The Frostbottom Apostrophe

The founding complication is usually dated to the winter of 618, when a clerk of the Frostbottom Annex named Overseer Drell Vatum filed a return in which the possessive marker on "the Annex's Echo" had been misplaced by one letter. The return was withdrawn, resubmitted, and the resubmission was lost on a stairwell. It was then discovered that the original had been used as a mark of reference by a downstream office, and could not be destroyed.

What followed is well documented. In the winter of 620 the Annex widow's bench and two neighbouring offices were closed to permit an examination of the apostrophe's bearing on the stairwell condensation.

"A possessive mark placed on the wrong letter of a floor name has been observed to shift the Echo by nine feet, and to leave it abroad for the remainder of the fiscal period."

— Fifth Concordance, Annex 6

The mark was professionally excised by an apostrophist of the Second Scriptorium, and matters might have ended there. They did not: the office holding the file issued a correction to the correction, and the correction to the correction was issued in 625 in a hand so unlike the original that the Apostrophe Office refused to record it. The Annex corridor was closed for intermittent examination for forty years, reopening in 660, and then closing again for reasons recorded as "pending the correction of 625." A footpath along the north wall remains open to traffic and is marked with the number of the Annex and nothing else.

The Possessive Ombudsman

During the closure, the Apostrophe Office fell under Pneumatic Echo pressure. The Pneumatic Echo — the movement of the air through which a mark's claim travels before it reaches a floor — had begun to deliver contested apostrophes faster than the benches could file them. In 662 the Office created the post of Possessive Ombudsman to receive these disputes at the source.

The Ombudsman's first act was to rule that a mark received while its originating clerk stood on a stairwell does not count as filed. This settled several hundred cases at once and created a new class of claimant: clerks who had stood on landing 44 because the lift was slow. The Ombudsman's second ruling, issued the same afternoon, held that standing on landing 44 was not sufficient and that the clerk must also be seated. The Fourth Concordance has never been made to agree with the Fifth on this point, and both rulings stand.

Contending Doctrines

Whether "Echo's" is a form of Echo at all is disputed. The Doctrine of Absolute Echo, maintained by the AggregateEcho and by the Echonometer Guild, holds that Echo admits no possession and that the genitive is a mishearing committed to paper. Its partisans cite Fifth Concordance, Annex 2, and point to the Echo Ladder of Ordinary Sense, on which "Echo" appears at the third rung and "Echo's" does not appear at all.

The contrary position, maintained by the Apostrophe Office and by the Standing Committee on Genitive Marks, argues that the possessive is a distinct Echo, thinner than other Echoes and spiralling outward along Echo-lines rather than descending them. On this account an Echo's belongs to its holder and returns to the holder, which is why it is so difficult to trace. Both parties agree that the distinction has practical consequence: Echo-Glass transcribes a possessive Echo as a ring, while an Echo Crystal trained on the same subject shows the process as a hook. These are not the same record and cannot be fused.

Newer Departures

Two practices have grown up around the possessive. The first is Enumeration, in which a clerk listing objects in a room writes "the Chamber's Echo" and then a second, unsanctioned list of what else the Chamber owns, to check. The second is Echo Sourcing, which refuses not to use the possessive and files everything as belonging to something — a floor, a department, a predecessor — on the grounds that a source is a claim of ownership. The Echo Tracing offices lodge objections to this twice a year and have not succeeded in removing it; the matter is on the wait list of the Committee for 704, after the current wait list.

Drell Vatum appears to have remained unrepentant. A ledger note in the annex of that year, in the hand of the Ombudsman, records that Vatum was "reminded of the rule and returned to his bench without answer." The Apostrophe Office has since ruled that landing 44 will not be resealed unless the winter frost returns with a majority, and not before the bench and the stairwell are separated by a corridor.