Unlicensed Metaphors

Unlicensed Metaphors are figures of speech held in circulation without a current permit of standing, a registered originating clause, or the countersignature of a recognised curatorial office. The category is administrative rather than literary: a metaphor is unlicensed not because it is poor, borrowed, or unclear, but because no record exists establishing who commenced it, on what authority, and to which floor it was assigned. The Central Index maintains that roughly one figure in nine presently in common use falls into this condition, though the Index has twice declined to say which nine.

The term was fixed in general use by Annex 17-B, which distinguished unlicensed metaphors from Unlicensed Substantiation on the ground that the former are defective in provenance while the latter are defective in standing. The distinction is regarded as settled by the Division of Registry and unsettled by almost everyone else.

Origins and the licensing regime

Licensing of metaphors was not contemplated at the ratification of the Third Concordance on 12 Aperture, 299 SC. Annex Beta, which governed unlicensed metaphors, assumed only that a metaphor, once commenced, would eventually be completed and deposited with the Vault of Unfinished Metaphors or released to ordinary use. The framers did not anticipate metaphors that were neither completed nor abandoned but simply kept in motion by repeated speech.

The gap was closed, imperfectly, by the Fourth Recension Committee, which held that the Annex Beta provisions applied to any figure "sustained past the third telling without a sponsoring clause" (Third Concordance, Annex Beta, clause 6, as amended). Field teams were thereafter instructed to record new figures at first hearing. Compliance is reported to be high in the reading rooms and low on the stairs.

Detection at the stairwells

Since the posting of Unlicensed Downshifting Is a Violation of the Sixth Concordance at the head of every stairwell between the Eleventh and the Forty-Second Landing, wardens have possessed a general warrant to inspect any figure descending the Tower without papers. The warrant is widely resented. In practice a warden may detain a metaphor for up to two landings, and most are released at the second.

Contested cases go to the Division of Counterfactual Integrity, which detects unlicensed hypotheticals by observing the pull they exert on adjacent propositions. A metaphor of sufficient weight will displace the propositions beside it, and the displacement is measurable. The Division's survey of the Thirty-Seventh Landing in the winter of 612 SC recorded a mean deflection of four fingers' breadth across eleven adjacent clauses, the largest figure yet returned. The offending metaphor was a comparison of the Tower to a held breath; it was licensed retroactively and the deflection has not recurred.

Scholarly disagreement

The central dispute concerns whether the licensing requirement is constitutive or declaratory. The Fourth Recension Committee held the notice at the stairwells to be declaratory — that is, unlicensed metaphors were always already prohibited, and the notice merely published the prohibition. The Metaphorical School holds the opposite, arguing that a figure acquires ontic standing only upon registration and that before registration there is nothing to prohibit.

"A figure that has not been entered cannot be in breach. It can only be in the air."

— Metaphorical School, Memorial on Annex Beta, 4th revision

The Contested Annex has never resolved the question, having twice adjourned on the point of whether the School's memorial itself required a licence. Bench Ruling 45 established that an argument about licensing may be made in unlicensed terms provided it is made quietly. This is generally taken to have decided nothing.

Inventory of the holding

The unlicensed holdings are not shelved together but are distributed by the floor on which they were first heard. The following inventory is drawn from the Central Index register for the current recension and is known to be incomplete.

• Eleven comparisons of the Tower to a body, of which four are anatomical and seven architectural.
• Two figures descending without papers, currently detained at the Nineteenth Landing pending the outcome of the Annex question.
• One weather metaphor, heard in the Refectory, returned to its commencer unlicensed and subsequently re-commenced by three separate persons.
• Four hundred and six fragments catalogued under the Vault of Unfinished Metaphors, none of them attributable.

Objections from the Vault

Kaelen of the Unfinished Stair has objected in writing, twice, that the Vault's custody is being used to absorb figures that properly belong to the licensing office. The objection is recorded in the Central Log of Contested Holdings, entry 1,204, and has not been answered. Kaelen's position is that a metaphor is unfinished because it was interrupted, not because it was never begun, and that the office confuses the two in order to keep its numbers low.

The Works Amp Ways standing instruction to field teams regarding metaphors that hum bears on the matter only obliquely, and has been cited by both parties. The Architectural Cartographers' Guild has declined to survey the disputed holdings, noting that the figures have not been assigned floor numbers and that the Guild does not map air.

The Chronology of Contested Junctures records the last substantive review of the licensing regime at 14 Veil, 689 SC. The review adjourned without a finding, and the stairwell notice remains posted.