What the Letters Stand For

CIVIL RECORDS DIRECTORATE — SOLAR SYSTEM CONCORD Interoffice correspondence, notation series From: Senior Registrar M. Tulloch, Forms and Notation To: Clerk-Recorder A. Sedge, second year Subject: Your note of Early Autumn, Day 9, on the expansion of U.C.S.D.

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Your note is accurately copied and courteously put, which is more than most corrections manage, so it will get a fuller answer than most corrections earn.

You report that the standard sheet you consulted — an archival publication, by your citation — expands the notation as Universal Concord Standard Date; and that every form in this directorate's supply room, every ledger heading, and the stamp on your own intake desk expands it United Concord Star Date; and you ask which expansion should appear in the new intake ledger you have been asked to rule.

Here is what this office knows, as distinct from what it assumes. I have held a seat in Forms and Notation for thirty-one years. In that time every form we have printed has carried our expansion. The style ledger's earliest surviving revision already gives it, without remark, as a thing not then in question. My predecessor used it in her minutes; the account given to me in my own second year was that the expansion honoured the union of the Concord's worlds under one notation, and I have passed the same account to others since, as it was passed to me. You are the first person in my tenure to bring an outside sheet in. As far as this directorate's holdings run, United Concord Star Date is what the letters have always stood for here.

I do not doubt your citation, and I ask you to notice how little daylight it leaves. Set the two expansions side by side and they differ by a word and a space: Universal against United, Standard Date against Star Date, and Concord standing untouched in the middle of both. You have assumed, courteously, that the drift runs toward us — that your sheet holds the original and our forms have wandered from it. I have been reading forms longer than you have, and thirty-one years teaches one thing above all: everything drifts, sheets included, and a document does not become the original by being the one you happened to read first. So consider, before you rule your ledger, what a common date actually is. It is not a fact about the sky. It is an agreement — the same agreement a charter is, or a boundary, or a form: a thing that holds because the parties using it are united in using it, and for no other reason. Their word is universal, which is the ambition. Ours is united, which is the mechanism that makes the ambition work on paper. I decline to regard these as rivals.

Practically, the question ruled on your desk is smaller than the question asked in your note, and I will answer the desk's version first. The two expansions expand the same notation. A year written under theirs and a year written under ours is the same year, converts by the same table, and files in the same sequence. No document in this directorate is mis-dated under either reading; no correspondence with any other office fails on it; and no form will be reprinted. In office documents, use the office expansion. In your diary, use whichever you please.

Both expansions are valid; ours is the one in use.

You asked, at the end of your note, which is true. Both are in daily use, which is the only kind of truth a calendar requires of an expansion. If the letters were first set down to stand for something else — and I concede to you freely that first settings-down are the sort of thing this office does not hold — then the record of it lies on another archive's shelf. A meaning that must be fetched from another archive is, for working purposes, a meaning we do not have; and a directorate that ruled its forms by meanings it does not hold would soon be ruled by every visiting sheet in turn.

The forms go to the printer as they are. Thank you for reading them closely enough to notice. Fewer do every year.

— M.T.