Appendix — Working Terms

Working Terms

These terms are reminders for scenes already argued in the chapters—not a checklist for diagnosing every room, and not a syllabus to recite over a meeting.

Alignment / sorting — Communication that classifies audiences by loyalty or belonging rather than testing claims across a shared evaluative space.

Interpretation — A shared public process by which meaning is evaluated, contested, and made consequential for legitimacy, accountability, and repair. Not merely private understanding or personal opinion.

Interpretive leverage — The capacity of understanding, reasons, or evidence to alter authority’s standing. Understanding can persist after leverage is gone.

Narrative enclosure — An interpretive system that remains active inside a bounded story while reclassifying external objections as persecution, testing, misunderstanding, fulfillment, or confirmation.

Witness — Judgment that records, refuses erasure, or remembers after the pathways that once connected recognition to consequence have been destroyed. Witness is not a substitute for repair; it is what judgment can still do when repair is gone.