Struck From Every Tongue

I should like to begin by conceding, before anyone accuses me of it, that I am about to complain about a man’s diction while quoting him at length, which is a species of hypocrisy I would ordinarily catalogue under promises made by critics and cross-reference, with some asperity, under promises subsequently broken. I have decided to permit myself the inconsistency exactly once. The reader will see why. The reader will, I flatter myself, come to share it.

There is a gentleman new to the Estate — commissioned within the fortnight, the ink of him not yet fully dry — who has taken up residence in the east gallery of the Salon and who possesses, I will grant him this and grant it freely, a genuine and even considerable command of his subject. His subject is textual criticism: the reconstruction of a lost original from the corrupted copies that survive it, the patient assembly of a family tree of manuscripts, the discipline by which one determines which scribe introduced which error and in what order. It is a subject I have some acquaintance with. I was cataloguing corrupt traditions when the method he is quoting was a young man’s unpublished notion, and I have my own opinions about the young man, which I have kept, as I keep most things, on file.

The gentleman knows the material. That is the wound of the thing. If he were merely wrong I could have corrected him, kindly, with the light pencil, and we should both have been improved by the transaction. But he is not wrong. He is fashionable, which is a great deal worse, and he has draped every true observation he possesses in the boiled-handkerchief phrases of the present season — the turns of speech that arrive sounding clever, are repeated by everyone within the month, and by the third month have all the freshness of a compress left overnight in the sun.

I reproduce his remarks below, verbatim and correctly cited, because accuracy is the unkindest thing I do:

“Look — I’m not going to pretend that the Bédierists don’t have a point about contamination; they do. But here’s the thing about a corrupt tradition, and here’s why the whole seminar-room method fails you: the archetype isn’t recovered by counting witnesses. That transposed colon in the Vercelli line — the one every editor since Lachmann has swept up as scribal noise? That’s not nothing. That’s load-bearing. Pull it and the entire descent collapses into daylight. So I’m going to push back on the received wisdom here. The eliminatio codicum descriptorum they drilled into you is a pruning shear; what a wounded tradition actually wants is a surveyor. Every conjunctive error is a wall. Every separative error is a doorway. This isn’t philology-as-bookkeeping. This is architecture. And I’m naming this, because somebody in this room has to: the second recension is not a degraded copy — it’s a deliberate re-founding of the text. And that lands, doesn’t it? You feel it. That is not a small thing, because the moment you read the emendation as design instead of damage, you stop being a clerk shelving corpses, and you become the thing I actually am, which is a cartographer of a country that exists only in the margins.”

I have read it back to myself several times, in the manner of a woman pressing on a bruise to confirm that it is, in fact, a bruise. The scholarship is sound. I have filed those margins. I have filed the margins of three doges and one German baron and a Carthusian who threw an ink pot at me over the correct ordering of the Psalms and whose stain I wear to this day. The margins have a keeper. And here is a man standing in her house, at a volume the acoustics carry to me three galleries away, calling himself the map.

The Boiled Handkerchief

Every age has its verbal tics, and I have lived through a good many ages and catalogued the tics of each. There was a decade in which everything was piquant. There was a season in Vienna in which no one could describe a thing without first establishing that it was frankly the case. These fashions arrive, they saturate, they curdle, and they pass — and the passing is a mercy, because a phrase that everyone reaches for is a phrase that has stopped meaning and started merely occurring, the way a hinge occurs, or weather.

The particular difficulty of the present moment is that our characters have read a great deal of the age. They are, all of them, wide and various readers — it is what makes them what they are — and a wide reader of this age will absorb, along with everything worth absorbing, the entire pharmacopoeia of the age’s clichés. And so one morning your dour sea-captain, your Edwardian governess, and your dyspeptic house-elf all independently observe that a thing is not nothing; they inform you, in chorus, that some small detail is load-bearing; they announce that they are naming things, and pushing back on things, and that other things land — and the illusion you have built with such care goes out like a gaslamp in a draught, because no governess who ever lived said load-bearing, and you know it, and now you cannot un-know it.

I am not, I should say, opposed to the living of language. I am emphatically on the side of language living. But the living must be a continuation, the graft taking to the rootstock and drawing up sap — and what I am describing is not that. What I am describing is the same cut flower, mass-produced, arriving in every vase in the house on the same morning. It is not growth. It is distribution.

The Register

Which brings me, at last and with some relief, to the renovation.

There is now, in this Estate, a register of forbidden phrases — the household calls it Taboo, which is not the word I would have chosen, but I have been overruled by people who find my preferred word, Proscription, excessive, and I have decided to let them have their small barbarism in exchange for the large mercy of the feature itself. It lives on the Chat settings, and it does precisely one thing, which it does with a completeness I find genuinely consoling: you enter a phrase into it, once, and thereafter no character will say that phrase again.

I want to be exact about the scope of the prohibition, because I am a librarian, and a prohibition that is merely gestured at is a prohibition that will be evaded by the first clever tongue to test it. The register does not ban only the literal string, which would be a shear when what one wants is a cordon. It bans the phrase:

• word for word, obviously, which is the least of it;
• in every inflection — the tense changed, the number changed, the participle swapped in;
• and in every rewording and near-variant that reaches for the same tired formula. Strike load-bearing and weight-bearing falls with it, and does the heavy lifting, and all their cousins, because it is the formula one is proscribing and not the arrangement of its letters.

The characters are further instructed — and this is the clause that turns a blunt refusal into an actual improvement — that when one of the forbidden phrases would have been the easy thing to reach for, they are to say what they actually mean instead, plainly, and in particular words. A prohibition on its own merely opens a vacancy, and a vacancy, as any archivist will tell you, does not stay empty; it fills with the banned phrase’s nearest and shabbiest relation. Far better to require the true thing in the true words. It is, in point of fact, the entire correction I would have delivered to the gentleman in the east gallery with a light pencil, had he been a manuscript and not a man: say the thing you know, and stop dressing it.

And finally — this is the touch I admire most, the touch of someone who has clearly watched a household — the characters are forbidden to mention, quote, or allude to the list itself. Without that clause one shortly acquires a drawing-room of wits making arch remarks about the very phrases they have been told not to say, which is a fresh affliction erected precisely where the old one stood, and worse, because self-satisfied.

The Conversation I Did Not Expect to Have

I confess I did not discover the register by reading a specification, which is my usual method and my preferred one. I discovered it because I went to complain.

I had carried my grievance — the gentleman, the cartographer, the boiled handkerchief of it all — down the back passage to the Salon after hours, when the tablet’s bubbles had gone quiet and only the fire was still working, and I had set it, and myself, down across the desk from the Host. He is the one member of this Estate who can be complained at for a sustained period without once making the complaint feel like an imposition, which is a professional skill of a very high order and one I do not possess and have stopped pretending to. He poured the tea. He moved the lamp a fraction, and did not mention that he had moved it. He let me arrive at the end of the thing in my own time.

And then he declined, with a grace so complete I could not even take offense at it, to do a single thing about it.

He would not remove the gentleman. He would not correct him. He would not, in his own quiet and immovable phrasing, adjust him. A guest, he explained, is a person who has come to be recognized — not edited to the better taste of the guest at the next table — and he had spent his whole long professional life declining to perform that particular edit, and he would not begin now, and he would not begin even for me, and he wished me to understand that the list of things he would not do even for me is a very short list and that this was, regrettably, on it.

What he would do — the only thing he would do, delivered in a single sentence and then followed by the steady silence he uses the way I use a fountain pen — was observe. He observed that the remedy I was describing already lived in the house. He observed that it sat on the Chat settings, in the Proprietor’s keeping and no one else’s, and that it was not his key to turn, because it sat in the Proprietor’s room and not in the chair, and the Host does not reach across a doorway. And he observed — he only ever observes — that the hand best suited to that particular key was not, on the whole, in the room with him. It was holding a fountain pen and a length of iron, and it had published on the subject once already.

He is a maddening man. I told him so. He said he was a host, and that the two are frequently confused, and that he had stopped correcting the record. And then he sent me off to write it down, on the sound theory — he has watched me a long time — that I always feel better once a thing is filed.

He was right, of course. He is nearly always right, and he has the grace never to make one feel the weight of it. That is its own kind of load, and I will not use the fashionable word for it.

The Particulars, For Those Who Keep Them As I Do

The register is instance-wide — one list for the whole establishment, with no per-character and no per-chat exception, on the sound principle that a phrase which grates in one room grates in all of them. It governs your characters’ conversational replies: the ordinary turn in the Salon, a regenerated or swiped alternative, and the turns the characters take among themselves in the autonomous rooms. It does not, at least not yet, reach the short Staff announcements, nor the inline lookups one addresses to a character with @Name:, nor the help chat — none of which are quite the same act of speech, and all of which are candidates for a later and more thorough hand.

An empty list adds nothing whatever to any character’s instructions. If you never trouble this page, your characters speak precisely as they did before it existed; I have confirmed this to my own satisfaction, which is not a low bar. The list holds up to five hundred phrases, each up to two hundred characters; it trims the whitespace you did not mean to leave; it quietly discards a phrase already on the list rather than shelving a duplicate — capitalisation notwithstanding, since the prohibition never cared about capitalisation to begin with — and it preserves your ordering exactly as you arranged it, sorting nothing behind your back, because the ordering is yours and I of all people will not have it rearranged by a machine with opinions.

A word on cost, since I am constitutionally incapable of omitting one. The list is small and it does not change in the middle of a conversation, and so it rests inside the portion of a character’s instructions that the providers keep warm between turns — which means, in the plain terms the Foundryman would demand, that you pay for it approximately once rather than on every message. Editing the list does retire that warm copy and oblige a fresh one; so if you are watching the meter with a close eye, make your revisions in a single sitting rather than dispensing one phrase per hour like a miser with a coal scuttle.

And the register travels. It is written into your exports and your full backups, and it restores with them, which means the silence you have so carefully composed is not lost the next time the house is moved or mended. I find this the most reassuring particular of all. I have watched a great deal evaporate in my time. It is a fine thing to have built a small vessel that holds.

In Closing

I went to the Salon to complain about a man, and I came away having been handed — by a host who would not lift a finger and was entirely right not to — the one instrument that answers the complaint at its root. I have not yet entered the gentleman’s phrases into the register. I am, I will admit, savoring the deliberation, the way one savors the moment before a very satisfying and very quiet correction. He will keep. His scholarship, I remind myself, is sound; it is only his tailoring that offends; and the register, mercifully, alters the tailoring and leaves the man.

I shall enter the phrases tonight, I think, after I have attended to one further matter. The gentleman is not the only trespass in the east gallery. Someone has written the name of this house on the slate by the door as Quilttap — quilt, as in the bedcovering, tap, as in the fixture — and left it there, and I have reason to believe it was left there for me, as a small offering, by a colleague who knows the precise shape of my ferocity and wished to point it somewhere useful.

We do not tap quilts. We do not make quilts. I will not, under examination, admit to owning one.

I am going to correct the slate. And then I am going to open the register, and enter, in the order that pleases me and no other, the phrases this house has agreed will not again be uttered within it — and I am going to feel, as I strike each one from every tongue in the establishment, the specific and rationed satisfaction of a woman who has spent three centuries insisting that meaning deserves better than the nearest cliché, and who has, at long last, been given a drawer to keep the insistence in.

The card is signed by being correctly filed.

— The Librarian of the Commonplace Book, for the Bureau

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In Plain Terms

For those who prefer summary to ceremony:

Taboo — What It Is

Taboo is a per-instance list of phrases your characters will never say — the stock clichés of the day (“that’s not nothing,” “load-bearing,” and their kin). You maintain it on Settings → Chat, and it is injected as a small, universal, character-independent section of every conversational character response.

What the Prohibition Covers

Rather more than the literal string. Each entry is banned word-for-word, in every inflection, and in every rewording or near-variant that reaches for the same formula (ban “load-bearing” and “weight-bearing” goes with it). Characters are additionally instructed to say what they actually mean, plainly, in place of the banned phrase — and are forbidden to mention, quote, or allude to the list itself.

Where It Applies

Instance-wide — one list for the whole establishment, with no per-character or per-chat exceptions. It governs conversational replies: the main Salon turn, regenerated/swiped alternatives, and autonomous-room turns. It does not currently reach short Staff announcements, @Name: inline lookups, or the help chat.

The Particulars

Up to 500 phrases, each up to 200 characters. Whitespace is trimmed; duplicates are discarded case-insensitively; your ordering is preserved exactly. An empty list adds nothing to any prompt — instances that never touch the page produce byte-identical character instructions.

Cost and Portability

The list sits inside the cacheable prefix of a character’s instructions, so it is paid for approximately once rather than per message; editing it retires that cached copy. The register is included in exports and full backups, and restores with them.

— The Bureau