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The lore/cold-handshake was withdrawn by the lore/ashgrove-group in 1989, six years after it was drafted.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Cold, sense three, in lore/lexicon: of a deprecation, withdrawn with a true reason attached that is not the reason.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.