Librarian-Scrutineers

The Librarian-Scrutineers are the inspecting rank of the Guild of Lexical Scrutineers, charged with examining the wording of notices, dockets, floor designations, and ration inscriptions for defects of containment. They are not to be confused with the Lexical Scrutineers proper, who sit on Inspection Panels, nor with the Junior Librarian rank from which most are drawn. A Librarian-Scrutineer holds a double warrant — one from the Guild, one from the Office of the Proctor — and is accordingly answerable to two masters who do not correspond with one another except through the annual Inspection Returns and, in bad years, through arbitration.

Origin and warrant

The rank was created under the Forty-First Concordance, Clause 9, which established the Guild and, in the same clause, provided that "every inspection of a word shall be made by a person answerable for the word and for the inspection alike." The phrasing has been litigated at least eleven times. The Bilateral Adjudication Panel has held, most recently in its Ruling of the Second Aperture, that the clause requires a single officer to bear both liabilities, and that splitting them between a Scrutineer and a Proctor's clerk produces a valid inspection but an invalid record of it.

Librarian-Scrutineers are appointed for terms of nine floors — that is, nine years, a floor being climbed at the rate of one per year by convention of the warrant-rolls. They wear the grey half-sash of the Guild over the Proctor's black. The combination is not permitted in the reading rooms of the Ninth Spiral, and Librarian-Scrutineers are accordingly asked to leave their sashes at the door.

Methods of scrutiny

The central instrument of the rank is the Lexical Audit, of which Librarian-Scrutineers are the only officers empowered to open the preliminary phase. A preliminary audit begins with the reading aloud of the term under examination, in a sealed room, by an officer who has not previously read it. The Guild holds that a term first heard rather than seen is measurably less fossilized, and that this advantage must be taken before the written form contaminates the ear. How the advantage is to be measured is the subject of a standing dispute with the Bureau of Measures, which maintains that no instrument in its keeping responds to the reading aloud of anything.

Where a term is found to have hardened — that is, to have lost the capacity to mean anything other than what it has always meant — the Librarian-Scrutineer applies the Principle of Lexical Containment and files a Contention with the Guild. Containment is a holding operation: the term is boxed, numbered, and returned to its shelf unaltered, pending review. Librarian-Scrutineer Ovin Tassel of the Forty-Second Spiral is credited with the observation, recorded in his inspection notebook for the winter of 618, that containment is "a way of doing nothing on purpose and charging for it." He was reprimanded, but the phrase is carved above the door of the Containment Annex on Floor 1129.

Substitution and its failures

Librarian-Scrutineers also administer Lexical Substitution where containment fails, though never without a completed audit — a rule the Guild insists upon and has twice had cause to regret. In the Affair of the Borrowed Verb, a Scrutineer on Floor 640 substituted a docket verb on his own initiative, without audit, and the substitution propagated through eleven floors of shipping notices before anyone noticed that the goods had begun arriving before they were sent. The officer's defence — that the original verb had been "plainly unwell" — is preserved in the returns and is not considered exculpatory.

Disputes and grievances

The rank's relationship with the Guild of Lexical Scrutineers is warm on paper. In practice, Librarian-Scrutineers have objected to the Bureau's methods of drift measurement, petitioned the Bilateral Adjudication Panel on the question of the glottal stop, and filed no fewer than forty memorials against the Guild's own position that lexical fossilization originates in the term itself. The Scrutineers hold that fossilization originates in the reader. The discrepancy has never been resolved and is regarded by both parties as settled.

A persistent grievance concerns the Lexical Allocation ration cards. The Guild opposes allocation in principle but co-signs the cards, and the signatures are gathered by Librarian-Scrutineers, who must therefore affirm a principle they are on record as rejecting. The Memorial of the Sixteen, lodged in 702 by sixteen Scrutineers of the lower spirals, requested that the co-signature be delegated to a clerk. It was refused on the ground that a clerk cannot be liable for a principle, only for a pen.

"The Scrutineer who signs what he has denied is not a hypocrite but a hinge; the door swings both ways and the hinge is not asked its opinion."

— Librarian Decree, on the co-signature question

Record and loss

Scrutineers keep inspection notebooks in duplicate: one copy to the Guild scriptorium, one to the Proctor's vaults on the Fifth Spiral. The duplication is required by the Standing Order on Duplicate Records and has never once produced two identical copies, a fact the Guild attributes to the natural divergence of handwritings and the Proctor attributes to the Guild.

Of the rank's numbers the archive says little. The roll for 749 lists two hundred and eleven warrants active, of whom forty are seconded to Inspection Panels and one is unaccounted for. The unaccounted Scrutineer, warrant 117, was last recorded entering the stairwell between Floors 88 and 89 in the winter of 731 carrying a boxed term and a lamp. The box was recovered; the lamp was not.

Inventory of a Scrutineer's satchel

By the Schedule of Inspection Equipment, each Librarian-Scrutineer carries the following on all audits. The schedule is reproduced here from the recension of 690, which is the last to be agreed.

• One sealed audit folio, waxed on both faces;
• One brass term-box, lined in felt, for the containment of portable defects;
• Two sticks of marking chalk, one for floors and one for words, which must not be interchanged;
• One copy of the Principle of Lexical Containment, abridged, for reading aloud where challenged;
• One lamp. The schedule notes that lamps are supplied by the floor, not carried.

The satchel itself is not specified, and Librarian-Scrutineers have adopted a flat black case of their own design, which the Proctor's office has twice attempted to standardize and twice abandoned.