Office of Designations and Epithets

The Office of Designations and Epithets is the Tower body responsible for the formal bestowal, amendment, and ceremonial reading of names upon catalogued entities. It occupies the eastern half of Floor 88-Rho, shares a service corridor with the Office of Onomastic Coincidence, and has never in its recorded history occupied the western half, which is a stairwell. The Office does not maintain the rolls on which its own designations are listed; that is the work of the Master Roll of Active Designations, a separation of function established in Cycle 404 and regretted by every Clerk of the Office since.

The Office is frequently confused with the Committee on Nominative Distinction, which rules on whether two designations are in fact distinct, and with the Office of Syntactical Purity, which issues TC-Σ designations and returns anything else unopened. The Office of Designations and Epithets does neither. It confers names. It is the only body in the Tower whose seal reads Hoc Nomen Statuitur, and the only one whose seal is applied by hand.

Structure and the Seal Registry

The Office is headed by a Designator Presumptive, a post currently held in commission by Clerk-Adjutant Miren Halloway, whose appointment has been renewed eleven times without being confirmed once. Beneath the Designator sit the three Epithet Benches — the Bench of Circumstance, the Bench of Duration, and the Bench of Regret — each of which reviews proposed epithets and strikes those it considers unsupported by the record. The Bench of Regret was created by Ordinance Theta-4 in Cycle 812 to regularize references to Librarians of non-unique given name, and has since struck 4,116 epithets, of which 4,090 were later reinstated by appeal.

Every designation conferred passes through the Seal Registry, a ledger of applied impressions kept in a locked cabinet in the eastern half of Floor 88-Rho. The Registry records the date, the conferring clerk, the number of the impression, and the temperature of the sealing wax at the moment of application. The temperature column was added in Cycle 903 after the Kelwith dispute, in which a designation was challenged on the grounds that its seal had been applied cold and was therefore, in the petitioner's words, "a mark and not a naming." The Office of the Arbiter heard the challenge for nine cycles and ruled that a cold seal was valid but ought not to have been; the temperature column has been maintained ever since, and no entry in it has ever been consulted.

The Thorn Petition and the Limits of the Office

The Office's authority is best understood through what it declined to do. In the matter of the Petition for Designation Continuance 771-Alpha, submitted by Aris Thorn, the petitioner asked the Office to continue a designation that had lapsed through non-use. The Office returned the petition with a single annotation: Continuance is not conferral. Thorn appealed, and the appeal produced the exchange most often quoted in the Office's own training materials:

"The Office may name a thing that is not. It may not name a thing that was and is no longer, for the second naming would require the Office to say which of the two is the thing."

— Designation Management, Annex 9

The petition was ultimately resolved elsewhere, and the Office has declined to comment on the resolution on the grounds that commenting would constitute a fresh conferral. This reticence is doctrinal rather than personal. Clerks of the Office are instructed that any sentence beginning "in effect, this designation means—" is itself a designation and must be sealed.

Dispute with the Office of Syntactical Purity

The longest-running disagreement in the Office's history concerns whether a name conferred by the Office may be reformatted by another body. The Office of Syntactical Purity holds that any designation, once written, falls under its protocols and may be normalized for the register. The Office of Designations and Epithets holds that a name is not a string of characters but an act, and that normalizing an act is impossible. In Cycle 941 the Purity Office returned 300 epithets to Floor 88-Rho with their spacing corrected, and the Office re-conferred all 300 rather than accept the corrected forms, at a cost of eleven days and four seals. The Office of Archival Integrity classified the resulting duplicate entries as a Grade-2 Integrity Breach and rejected both sets until the Office of the Arbiter ruled that a re-conferred name supersedes its predecessor but retains its original impression number, a ruling that the Seal Registry still cannot accommodate.

The Coincidence Protocol

Where a proposed designation coincides with one already in use, the Office suspends conferral and refers the matter to the Office of Onomastic Coincidence, which determines whether the coincidence is genuine or merely apparent. This protocol has been invoked 71 times. In 68 cases the coincidence was found genuine and the Office conferred the designation with a contextualizing epithet appended, in the manner prescribed by Ordinance Theta-4. In the remaining three cases the Office was instructed to proceed without epithet, and did so, and the resulting entries have been a source of quiet embarrassment to the Bureau of Spatial Designations ever since.

Clerks are reminded that the Office does not name floors, galleries, spirals, or apertures, and that enquiries of this kind should be directed to the Bureau, which is on the same corridor and answers its door more often. The Office does, however, name the doors themselves, and has done since a winter in Cycle 887 when an unnamed door on Floor 88-Rho was mistaken for a wall and plastered over. The door was recovered, and the Office's first act upon recovery was to confer upon it the designation Door, East, Retained. It has since been renamed twice and is currently Door, East, Retained (Provisional), pending review by the Bench of Duration.

Records and Access

The Office's proceedings are open to inspection by any Librarian of the Third Grade or above, on written application, during the hours the Seal Registry is unlocked. The Registry is unlocked on the second and fourth days of each cycle, weather permitting, and never while the wax is setting. Applications should be addressed to the Designator Presumptive, who will not be present.