Memorandum: what an office does not carry

MEMORANDUM TO ALL HOUSES AND CIRCLES MEM/1997/03

SUBJECT: THE USE OF OFFICES IN ADDRESS AND IN ARGUMENT

1. A letter received last month addresses the steward of a house by

her office and not by her name, three times, and asks her to settle

a matter on the strength of it. She has declined and has asked that

the practice be discouraged generally. It is discouraged.

2. An office is held. It is not possessed, awarded, earned, or grown

into. The holder does the work for the term and then somebody else

does it. Nothing about the person is different afterwards, and the

Record contains no means of recording that anything is.

3. It follows that an office is not an argument. 'The archivist takes

the view that' is a report of an opinion, not a reason to hold it.

Where a holder of an office is right, they are right for the same

reasons available to anybody else, and those reasons may be given.

4. Nor does a past office carry. A former treasurer is a member who

used to keep the books. This is not modesty; it is the whole of the

arrangement, and the arrangement is the reason the Institute has

never had to work out how to remove somebody important.