The Seventeenth Concordance, Clause 19

Scope

Clause 19 of the Seventeenth Concordance is the clause governing the preliminary designation of rooms, corridors, and incidental apertures encountered during cataloguing expeditions before those spaces have been assigned a permanent floor number. It is short — four numbered sub-clauses and a closing proviso — but it is cited more frequently than any other clause of comparable length, and it has been the subject of at least three recorded Concordance disputes since the Literalist Schism closed.

The clause exists because of a problem the Registry of Parcels could not solve on its own: expeditions regularly came upon spaces that were plainly there, plainly useful, and plainly not yet numbered. Under the older practice these were recorded as "unassigned" and left in that state for years, during which time stores were kept in them and, in one case, a wedding was held. Clause 19 closed this gap by permitting a provisional name.

Text

The operative wording of Clause 19 reads, in the standard recension:

"A room met with before it is numbered shall be provisionally named by the officer in attendance, such name being entered in the margin only, and lapsing upon the assignment of a number."

— Seventeenth Concordance, Clause 19, sub-clause 1(a)

Sub-clauses 1(b) through 1(d) constrain the practice. Provisional names must not resemble existing floor names; must not incorporate the name of the naming officer or any member of their household; and must be legible in the margin of the expedition ledger within a single line of ordinary text. The closing proviso — rarely quoted, frequently relied upon — states that a provisional name "acquires force of usage upon the third repetition of it by any officer in the course of ordinary duty."

Relationship to Clause VII

Clause 19 is frequently confused with Seventeenth Concordance, Clause VII, which deals with provisional assignments of an entirely different kind: the temporary naming of persons and hypothetical entities rather than spaces. The two clauses are adjacent in the printed Concordance, and the marginal numbering of early copies ran together, producing a class of citation error that persists. The distinction is maintained rigorously in practice — Clause VII restricts provisional name assignments to officers holding a sealed warrant, whereas Clause 19 imposes no warrant requirement at all, only a margin.

The Theoretical Jurisprudence Guild has argued since the 441st recension that Clause 19 is in fact a special case of the broader principle set out in Seventeenth Concordance, Clause VII and should be read as subordinate to it. The Clerks of the Net Load reject this on the grounds that a corridor cannot be presented with a warrant.

The margin question

The requirement that provisional names appear "in the margin only" has generated more litigation than any other element of the clause. Early expedition ledgers used wide margins; later binders, following a change of stock supplier, did not. Between the winter of the 17th recension and the convening of Concordance 12.1.7, officers recorded provisional names in whatever space remained, which in some volumes was the gutter, and in at least two surviving ledgers the facing page.

The ruling in Concordance 12.1.7 held that a name written in the gutter is not in the margin and therefore has no force, while a name written on the facing page is in the margin of a page and therefore does. This produced a period of deliberate gutter-avoidance among expedition clerks, and a corresponding rise in facing-page entries that the Scriptorium has since described as "legible but noisy."

The Ardor incident

The most cited application of Clause 19 concerns a service stair on a floor now identified only as "north of the Registry of Parcels annex." An officer provisionally named it in 441 during a routine survey; the name was repeated twice more within the following month by unrelated staff, and under the closing proviso it acquired force of usage. When the floor was finally numbered, the provisional name was found to have taken such hold in ordinary speech that the permanent designation was never adopted in practice, and both names are still in circulation.

The Seventeenth Concordance's later amendments, including The Seventeenth Concordance Amendment and Addendum 7 to the Seventeenth Concordance, did not disturb Clause 19. The provisionally named stair remains, by the operation of its own proviso, provisionally named.

Standing prohibitions

Officers on expeditions may not name a space after themselves, their relations, or a guild to which they belong; may not use the name of an adjacent numbered floor; and may not, in the Spire Annex 7 region, provisionally name any aperture smaller than a hand-span, on the grounds that such names are not recoverable.