Lingual/Nominative Drift

Lingual/Nominative Drift is the contemporary composite designation for the phenomenon more commonly recorded under the older heading Nominative Drift, and for the administrative apparatus assembled to measure it. The compound form was adopted by the Registry of Lingual Drift in the ninth year of the present recension, chiefly to settle a filing dispute between the Registry and the Sub-committee on Nominative Drift, which had for some decades maintained separate and incompatible card indexes under the two words in opposite order. The slash is not decorative. It marks the point at which the nominative and the lingual components of a drifting title were formally ruled to be one subject rather than two, a ruling that has been appealed eleven times and upheld ten.

In ordinary use the term denotes the gradual, uncontrolled alteration of a designated proper noun after its initial archival assignment — Nominative Drift proper — together with the wider instability of terms, titles, and annotations within which that alteration occurs. The Registry classifies the whole under Standard Drift, of which Nominative Drift is the primary subtype. Practically, the composite heading is used whenever a clerk cannot say with confidence whether a given instability belongs to the word or to the thing the word was assigned to, which is most of the time.

Origin of the compound form

The designation first appears in a marginal note of the Chamber of Measured Drift, dated to the winter of the year the west stairwell iced over and three floors were closed for a fortnight. The note, unsigned but in a hand since identified as that of the clerk Meridith Vane, reads in full: "the thing is both at once and I decline to choose." Vane was at the time engaged in reconciling the Registry's calibrated referents against the Central Chronometer, a task that had stalled because the referent labelled north-east window, third landing had begun, over successive readings, to denote a window on the second landing, then a door, and finally a quantity of unallocated shelving. Vane's complaint became the standing justification for the compound form: the word had moved and the referent had moved, and no instrument in the Tower could say which had moved first.

The Committee on Nominative Distinction objected on the grounds that a slash implied a ratio, and that no ratio had been established. The Registry replied that the slash implied nothing of the kind and was in fact an ordinary orthographic convenience, and the matter was closed by Measure 14 of the following year, which fixed the form for all subsequent record-keeping.

Measurement and the calibrated referents

Assessment of Lingual/Nominative Drift is carried out by the Registry's specialised cadre of analysts and investigators, the Linguistic Anomalists, who work from the Manual of Stable Referents and are required to confirm Type 1 status against its three criteria before any drift reading may be entered. The Manual of Stable Referents is the authority for those criteria, and the Registry's own inspectors have twice been censured for applying them in the wrong order.

Readings are expressed in drift-hours, a unit defined as the interval in which a designated term alters by one degree of its original specification, measured against a referent confirmed stable at the start of the reading. The unit is not cumulative; a term may drift and return, and a returned term is recorded as having drifted, which is the principal reason the Registry's totals exceed the number of terms it holds. The Drift-Sheen observed on recently amended entries is generally taken as corroboration, though the Anomalists themselves regard it as an effect of handling and not evidence of anything.

The quarrel with Benign Drift

A long-running disagreement divides the Registry from the compilers of Benign Drift schedules over where the boundary lies. The schedulers hold that alterations which settle within one generation of clerks and produce no contradiction in the catalogue are benign by definition, and require no further record. The Registry holds that benignity cannot be known in advance, that every benign drift was once a harmless root, and that the schedules are merely a way of not filing. The dispute has produced the peculiar situation that a term may be simultaneously listed as benign in the schedules and as active Lingual/Nominative Drift in the Registry's ledger, a duplication the Committee on Nominative Distinction has been asked to resolve since before the present recension and has not.

"The schedule does not alter the drift. It alters only the number of clerks who must be told of it, and that is a question for the Registry, not for us."

— Registry memorandum, appended to the Manual of Stable Referents, unnumbered leaf

Related instabilities are handled elsewhere and are not counted toward Lingual/Nominative Drift totals: Semantic Drift, Referential Drift, Echo-Locus Drift, and the widely reported nuisance of Ambient Footnote Drift, which the Registry maintains is a filing condition rather than a drift at all. The Sub-committee on Nominative Drift monitors and mitigates the nominative component from its dedicated scriptorium adjacent to the Registry, and its returns are the principal source for the Registry's annual statement.

Remedial observance

Rectification is assigned to Day 3, on which designated terms are read aloud against their referents and corrections entered in the same hand. Attendance at the readings is required of all clerks whose floors fall between the seventh and the twelfth landings; clerks above the twelfth read privately and submit their corrections by sealed tube. Anomalists attending in person are asked not to bring ink from their own floors, as it has been found to carry drift between scriptoria.

Where correction fails, the Registry's practice is to re-designate rather than to defend the original term, a policy credited with the survival of the archive and blamed by some for the state of its indexes. The most recent instance concerned the floor whose name drifted through four forms in a single season before settling on a description of its own staircase.

Disputed definition

The standing scholarly disagreement concerns whether Lingual/Nominative Drift names a process or its measurement. The Registry's regulations treat it as a process with a measurable signature. The Committee on Nominative Distinction, in its Fourth Recension, treats it as a measurement with an assumed process, observing that no clerk has ever witnessed the alteration itself, only its having occurred. A third position, advanced by the Sub-committee and never formally withdrawn, holds that the compound form was a mistake from the beginning and that Vane's note should have been filed as two complaints.

All three positions are consistent with the recorded readings, which is the reason none has displaced the others. The Registry's current practice is to enter the readings and to leave the question to the Central Chronometer, which has not been asked and does not answer.