Label drift

The condition in which a method’s vocabulary diffuses far ahead of its practice. Adopting the word costs a sentence and adopting the judgment costs an apprenticeship, so the label and the skill spread at speeds differing by orders of magnitude, and past some ratio the word stops predicting anything about what happens in the room. The informed and inspired suffixes are its usual carriers. Drift does not require bad faith; it requires only that the part which failed to transfer is the part nobody could have written down. The honest form of the same suffix declares its own uncertainty, as the Reggio Emilia alliance does in stating that Reggio-inspired is self-determined by the schools using it. The diagnostic is one question asked of any label, including our own safety vocabulary: what would have to be true for this word to be false here?