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 (3) Of a deprecation: withdrawn with a true reason attached that is not the reason.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