# The Deprecation, 1989

The [[lore/cold-handshake]] was withdrawn by the [[lore/ashgrove-group]] in
1989, six years after it was drafted. The withdrawal notice is one of the three
surviving Ashgrove documents and is the shortest.

It gives a reason. The reason is true. It is not the reason.

## What the notice says

That the procedure's timing assumptions no longer held on the plant it was
written for, the relevant equipment having been replaced, and that a procedure
whose timings cannot be met should not be left standing as though it could.

Every clause of this is correct and checkable, and the equipment change is
independently documented. As a technical statement the notice is unimpeachable.

## What it does not say

That the Handshake had by 1989 acquired a second life as an identity ritual — a
thing people performed to demonstrate they were the sort of person who could
perform it — and that this was precisely what its drafters had built it to avoid.
[[lore/pell]]'s drafting notes are explicit that a negotiation leaving no record
must not become a credential, because the moment it does, the absence of a
record stops being a protection and becomes a claim nobody can check.

By 1989 people were saying they had done it. That is the failure. The timings
were the occasion.

## Why this became a word

*Cold*, sense three, in [[lore/lexicon]]: **of a deprecation, withdrawn with a
true reason attached that is not the reason.**

The tradition took the manoeuvre as exemplary rather than evasive, and the
distinction it drew is worth being careful about. A cold deprecation is not a
lie and is not a cover story — a cover story is false. It is a withdrawal
justified on grounds that will survive scrutiny, leaving the actual grounds
unstated because stating them would require naming the people who had made the
thing necessary.

Ashgrove could have written *this has become a way of showing off and we are
stopping it*. That sentence has victims in it. The one they wrote does not, and
achieves the same outcome.

The Ledger's assessment in No. 62, "Cold Comfort", is the standard one: that the
notice is the most considerate document in the tradition and also the most
manipulative, and that these are not in tension.

## The dissent

One Ashgrove member objected, and the objection is recorded because the group
recorded overruled objections as a matter of form — see [[lore/ashgrove-group]].

The objection is that a deprecation nobody understands the real reason for
cannot be learned from, and that the group was choosing kindness now over
usefulness later. Thirty-odd years later, with the folder full of people
reconstructing the reason from inference, the objector looks substantially
correct.

The name is not recorded. The group attributed to the group.