# A Loop Lexicon

The underground's jargon is small and almost entirely made of plain words used
narrowly. That is characteristic of an oral tradition inside a technical craft:
the specialised terms are already supplied by the plant, so what the culture
invents is a handful of ordinary words with the edges filed off.

Where a term has a page, it links to it.

## The words

**bar, the** — the stroke across the [[lore/open-hand]]. Also, by extension, the
part of any mark that carries its meaning as opposed to its shape.

**carded** — recorded in the [[lore/sisken]] Index. *Carded but not seen* is the
standard formula for a thing whose existence rests on someone else's word, and
is used well outside any context where the Index is relevant.

**cold** — four senses, in rough order of age. (1) A circuit with no carrier
raised. (2) Of a negotiation: complete but leaving no record, per
[[lore/cold-handshake]]. (3) Of a deprecation: withdrawn with a true reason
attached that is not the reason. (4) Of a person: correct and unhelpful. The
fourth is affectionate and the third is not.

**count, the** — see [[lore/long-count]]. *Sitting* is the act, *sat* is the
completed state, *sitting for* is doing it on someone else's behalf, which is
cheating.

**fallow** — of a period in which nothing is added to a body of knowledge. Not
pejorative. The Fallow Ledger and the Fallow meets take their name from a
position, argued in the newsletter's first issue, that most of what a tradition
does should be lying fallow and that the compulsion to publish is the thing to
be resisted.

**graze** — to read a board or a channel without connecting to anything on it.
Not disapproved of, contrary to the usual outside assumption.

**hand, the** — the [[lore/open-hand]] mark. *Struck*, *counted* and *closed*
hands are the three failed extensions and calling something a hand without
qualification always means the plain one.

**hot** — of a bridge or a loop: carrying something unattributed. From the
Marchford ledger entry that is the only documentary trace of
[[lore/quiet-exchange]]. Deliberately not the opposite of *cold*, which
confuses everybody and has never been fixed.

**hum, the** — the two-byte reply on 4919, and by extension any signal that is
reliably present and carries no information. See [[lore/port-4919]].

**ledger-true** — of a claim: supported by a record that was made at the time by
someone with no stake in it. The strongest thing anybody says about a fact here,
used sparingly, and applied to roughly nine things.

**listening post** — a machine kept running solely to observe, holding nothing.
Originally the [[lore/gravewalker]] servers; now general.

**marrow** — originally the cartridge (see [[lore/marrow-tape]]); now, the part
of a body of material that everyone has copied and nobody has read past.

**meet** — an annual gathering. Numbered ordinally and never dated in speech,
which makes the literature very hard to use.

**quiet exchange, a** — any interval in which a system produced output nobody
was positioned to attribute. Broad enough to be nearly useless and used
constantly.

**roster** — a board's list of people who had sat the Count. Two rosters existed
and did not recognise each other for eleven years; see
[[lore/halberd-and-ossuary]]. Since the Armistice, *the roster* means the
absence of one.

**season** — the last two weeks of December, when idle time rises and the
[[lore/gravewalker]] buffers stop being overwritten. Never qualified. If someone
says *in season* they mean this.

**sweep** — to enumerate a range looking for what answers. Neutral as a word,
and the tradition's convention is that a sweep is something you report having
done and not something you report the results of.

**walker** — an artefact of a previous session appearing in a new one. From
[[lore/gravewalker]]; now used for any stale-buffer or stale-cache surprise, and
one of only two terms from this tradition that escaped into general use.

## The two that escaped

*Walker* and *cold deprecation*. Both are now used by people who have never
heard of the Loop, and both have narrowed on the way out: a walker in general
use is any stale buffer, without the implication that the previous session
belonged to somebody else, and a cold deprecation has softened from an
accusation of bad faith to a mild complaint about a changelog.

That is the ordinary fate of borrowed jargon and the tradition has never
minded. What it does mind, and says so at length in the Ledger's last issue, is
being told that the narrowing was a correction.

## Related

- [[lore/index]] — the collection
- [[lore/sources]] — where these usages are attested
- [[lore/lineage]] — who taught whom, which is also who said what to whom