External ordering

External ordering is the name given, in a single internal review and nowhere else, to the practice of importing a sequence from an unrelated printed source when an order is administratively required and no criterion for it exists. The term is not used by anyone who performs the practice. It appears to have been coined by the reviewer.

Conditions

The practice is described as arising under three conditions together: an order must be produced, the order must be defensible if questioned, and no ground for preferring one arrangement to another is available. Alphabetical order is avoided in the recorded instances, on grounds that are stated in one case only — that alphabetical order was felt to imply a claim about the items.

What is adopted instead is a sequence that already exists in print, that has nothing to do with the matter in hand, and that can be produced on request as the reason for the arrangement.

Identified instances

Four are documented.

The first concerns a reserve list at one of the outlets authorised to dispense Spondulex. The médicament is supplied in limited channels and the order in which the reserve is worked through is not published. The clerk responsible kept, folded inside the register, a page torn from Spin and dated 3 May 2012, being that magazine's list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time. The names on it — among them Sonny Sharrock, Neil Young, James Blood Ulmer, Fred Frith, Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew — bear no relation to anything the outlet handled. Positions on the list were assigned to entries on the reserve, and the reserve was then worked in that order.

The second concerns a cycling result sheet. The sheet as transcribed gives Andy Cappelle in twentieth place at the Grand Prix d'Isbergues, and the twentieth line was used, over four consecutive years, to determine which of twenty equivalent files would be reviewed first. The reviewer notes that the sheet was replaced annually and that the ordering therefore changed each year without anyone deciding that it should.

The third and fourth are recorded only as similar, with no source named.

Relation to the ledger

The review raises, without pursuing it, the possibility that the six letters in Manfred are of this kind: that they were not a classification but a borrowed sequence, and that the source, being of no interest in itself, was discarded once the entries were made.

The proposal has the advantage of explaining why the letters are internally consistent and externally meaningless. It has the disadvantage of being unfalsifiable, and the reviewer says so.

A related observation has been made about the figures in the Appendix of intervals, though there the objection is stronger: the figures maintain fixed relations to one another, which a borrowed sequence would not be expected to do.

Objections

Two are recorded. The first is that the practice is not a practice but a coincidence of four unrelated habits, and that naming it creates the thing it describes. The second is that any sufficiently arbitrary order will appear to have been imported from somewhere, and that the reviewer identified the four instances by looking for them.

Neither objection has been answered. The review was not circulated beyond the office that produced it, and the Mantilly cooperative, whose records supplied two of the four instances, was not informed that they had been examined.

See also

• Composite sheet — Appendix of intervals, External ordering, Manfred
• Manfred — Manfred, Mantilly cooperative
• Herman James — Appendix of intervals, Manfred
• Mirror unit — External ordering, Ordering source
• Kilometre reading — Appendix of intervals
• Route document — Appendix of intervals
• Levernet Rhapsody — External ordering
• Spondulex — Spondulex