Names Accrete Things gain syllables and never lose them. People do not.
You can date anything in this world by the length of its name — and a name that has stopped growing is how you know something is dead.
Accrete
Machines, engines, halls, orders, ships and cities. Every rebuild, refit, charter amendment or reconsecration is added and never removed.
Do not
One plain given name, one plain surname, unchanged from cradle to grave. There is no mechanism by which a person's name can grow.
The reading
A commissioning is therefore a reading: the whole name performed aloud, in full, and it can take several minutes. The name is inscribed complete on a brass plate and the plate grows with it. Old engines have plates the size of doors, and there are famous plates that have outgrown three buildings.
The logic underneath is blunt
Names grow with endurance, and people don't endure.
A woman called Pell Harrow spends forty years keeping an engine named the Perpetual Concordance of Saint Vessery, Thrice Rebuilt. In three hundred years the engine will still be called that, by name, aloud, at every reading. Nobody will know hers.
Which means the naming system quietly does to everyone what Principle VI does to the Craft: the people who keep the world running are, by design, unrecorded. Two rules built for entirely different reasons, arriving at the same cruelty.
The Scales has the longest names on earth
The city walks. Buildings in the path of the workings are dismantled and re-erected lower, made of their own bones — and every rebuild adds to the name. Visitors read the result as grandiosity. It is arithmetic.
The corollary — dating by ear
A long name is an old, well-kept, continuously-serving thing. A short one is either new or neglected, and a local can tell which from the shape of it.
And a name that has stopped growing is how you know something is dead. Not abandoned — abandoned things still get rebuilt eventually, and the name resumes. Stopped.
Which puts Lucerna Perpetua in a category of one: the name is exactly as long as it was on the day of the Promise, and every person who hears it knows the length is the epitaph.
Where the rule strains — offices
[proposed — awaiting a ruling] Guild-masters and horologists sit awkwardly here. They are institutions as much as people, and an institution accretes.
Working ruling: they do not accrete, but their office does, and they wear the office's name for as long as they hold it. So the name is enormous, ancient and borrowed, and it is taken off them the day they step down and handed to the next holder intact.
Which produces something rather good: a Balance Master is addressed by a name that has been growing for three centuries and has never once belonged to anybody.
The one thing with no plate at all
Every enduring thing in this world carries an inscribed Latinate name. Dead weight does not.
Pondus Mortuum is available, correct, and has never been cut into brass anywhere, because to Latinise it would be to admit it exists. In a civilisation where the name is the record, a substance the whole world stands on and no plate acknowledges is a scandal that has been waiting three hundred years to be noticed.
[proposed] — and if it holds, note the symmetry: the Craft have spoken names and no plate names; dead weight would have a spoken name and no plate name for the opposite reason.