# What they called themselves

*Loop* is a piece of ordinary telephone plant vocabulary: a circuit that returns
to where it started. The Ferris Loop was a route designation before anybody had
a tradition, and it appears that way in Cordell paperwork that predates every
event in this folder — see [[lore/cordell]].

The shift from *the Ferris Loop* to *the Loop*, meaning a group of people, is
datable to within a few years and is the only piece of self-naming anyone can
observe happening.

## The evidence for the shift

Three usages, in order:

| where | usage | reading |
| --- | --- | --- |
| plant binders, 1971– | "the Ferris Loop" | a route |
| [[lore/marchford]] ledger, 1978 | "the loop", lower case | still a circuit |
| [[lore/fallow-ledger]] No. 1, 1981 | "the Loop" | people |

Ten years and a capital letter. The Ledger's first issue uses it without
explanation, in the confident way of a term already current in speech, which
means the shift happened somewhere in the seventies among people who left no
writing.

## No word for a member

There is no noun. Not one.

You can be *on the Loop*, you can have *sat* — see [[lore/long-count]] — you can
be *carded*, and none of these is a membership term. There is nothing anybody
could have written on a badge.

This is unusual enough to be worth taking seriously. Comparable technical
undergrounds generate a member-noun almost immediately, because a name for
insiders is how a group starts being able to talk about itself.

Three explanations circulate, and the second is probably right.

**They had one and it is lost.** Possible, and unlikely: the [[lore/lexicon]]
preserves a dozen much rarer terms, and a member-noun would be the single most
frequently spoken word in the vocabulary.

**They never needed one.** These were colleagues. Men who work for the same
company on the same route do not need a word for each other — they have names,
and job titles, and the fact of being on the same shift. A member-noun is what
you invent when the group's boundary stops matching an existing boundary.

**They avoided one deliberately.** The romantic reading, and it has some support
in [[lore/pell]]'s objection to the [[lore/cold-handshake]] becoming *a way of
being someone*. But Pell is 1983 and the naming gap is a decade earlier, so this
would be a principle articulated long after the practice.

## The consequence

A group with no word for itself cannot easily be joined, and cannot easily be
left, and cannot police a boundary it has no term for.

That accounts for something otherwise odd about the tradition: nobody is ever
recorded as being excluded. There are disagreements, a withdrawal, a forgery and
eleven years of one-sided argument, and no expulsions and no factions with
names.

You cannot throw somebody out of a thing that has no word for being in it. The
worst available sanction was the one Ossuary eventually stopped applying —
checking a roster — and [[lore/armistice-banner]] is, read this way, less a
concession than a group discovering it had never had the machinery for a
schism in the first place.