Filed Replies, Vol. 19
From P. Okafor, Lagos:
I submitted a description of the Okafor family's 1987 Peugeot 504, which served as primary transport for eleven people, a goat, and seasonal groundnut harvest for over a decade. Your office rejected it. On what grounds?
The 504, whatever its cultural and logistical distinction, must clear the Silhouette Test before this office takes an interest in the cargo. Amendment 1991-08 requires that girth be demonstrable in the Subject itself, not distributed across its contents; a goat and groundnuts do not transfer their dimensions to the vehicle. Your submission should have included lateral measurements of the 504 in its unladen state. If the unladen 504 clears the threshold, file again, attention Records, citing this reply as pre-authorization. If it does not, I am sorry for your travel memories but they are not, strictly, our jurisdiction.
From D. Fleischer, Tempe:
Why does the Thiccctionary list the Atlantic Giant pumpkin as a verified Subject? It was bred to be big. That's cheating.
The Atlantic Giant was addressed by this office in March 2009. Precedent 2009-03 established, after considerable debate which I will not revisit here, that cultivated or selectively bred subjects are eligible under Section II.4 of the Style Guide, provided the girth is real and measurable and not, for example, cosmetic or photographic. "Cheating" is not a cataloguing term. If you disagree with the 2009 decision, you are welcome to submit a formal objection; the form is on the site, the process takes approximately eighteen months, and I will be the one reading it.
From C. Hutchins, Duluth:
Heard the office coffee machine has been broken since March. Is that March of this year?
March of this year would be the charitable interpretation. The machine, a Bunn NHBX-B acquired in fiscal year 2019 as a partial concession following what I am permitted to call only "the Grievance 38 resolution," developed a pressure fault on the third of that month, which I reported to Constance Pribyl, Director of Editorial Operations, in writing by close of business the same day. Constance replied, and I am quoting from memory with high confidence, "Hi Bart! Parking this for now but flagging for Q4 review." It is Q4. The machine is on my credenza producing a sound I can only describe as preemptive. Filed objection to the Records Desk, cross-referenced to Personnel File Grievance No. 47, which is new.
From T. Wren, Edinburgh:
The United States recently announced sweeping new tariffs on imported goods. Curious what the Thiccctionary makes of this.
A tariff is, by any honest reading, a girth criterion applied to commerce rather than to subjects, which means the United States government has been doing amateur cataloguing in public and calling it trade policy. The methodology is recognizable: you establish a threshold, you measure what crosses it, you impose a consequence on anything that exceeds your tolerance. The error, and it is a familiar one to anyone who has processed submissions for seventeen years, is failing to define the Silhouette Test in advance. You cannot retroactively decide what counts as too large. That is not a tariff regime; that is a pile of notes on a desk that hasn't been properly filed. I have seen Teddy do this. It does not resolve the Saturn V brief, and it will not resolve this.
From B. Morel, Montreal:
I notice the Thiccctionary has no entry for the Liebherr T 282B mining truck. It seems like an obvious candidate. What happened?
What happened is forty years of institutional memory that I will now compress into a single reply out of generosity. The Liebherr T 282B was submitted, assessed, debated, and entered into the catalogue by this office in 1986 under Memo 1986-04 (/about/documents/liebherr-memo/), which I wrote. It was subsequently removed in 1993 during what I will describe only as an editorial realignment under the then-Publisher, reinstated in 2004 after I submitted a 31-page brief to Bertram Whitmore aboard the Margaret IV, and is currently in the catalogue, visible to anyone who looks. The entry stands. It has always stood. It is, in my professional assessment, one of the stronger entries in the archive, and I say that as someone who does not make a habit of saying things like that.