What they called themselves
Loop is a piece of ordinary telephone plant vocabulary: a circuit that returns to where it started. The Ferris Loop was a route designation before anybody had a tradition, and it appears that way in Cordell paperwork that predates every event in this folder — see lore/cordell.
The shift from the Ferris Loop to the Loop, meaning a group of people, is datable to within a few years and is the only piece of self-naming anyone can observe happening.
The evidence for the shift
Three usages, in order:
| where | usage | reading |
|---|---|---|
| plant binders, 1971– | "the Ferris Loop" | a route |
| lore/marchford ledger, 1978 | "the loop", lower case | still a circuit |
| lore/fallow-ledger No. 1, 1981 | "the Loop" | people |
Ten years and a capital letter. The Ledger's first issue uses it without explanation, in the confident way of a term already current in speech, which means the shift happened somewhere in the seventies among people who left no writing.
No word for a member
There is no noun. Not one.
You can be on the Loop, you can have sat — see lore/long-count — you can be carded, and none of these is a membership term. There is nothing anybody could have written on a badge.
This is unusual enough to be worth taking seriously. Comparable technical undergrounds generate a member-noun almost immediately, because a name for insiders is how a group starts being able to talk about itself.
Three explanations circulate, and the second is probably right.
They had one and it is lost. Possible, and unlikely: the lore/lexicon preserves a dozen much rarer terms, and a member-noun would be the single most frequently spoken word in the vocabulary.
They never needed one. These were colleagues. Men who work for the same company on the same route do not need a word for each other — they have names, and job titles, and the fact of being on the same shift. A member-noun is what you invent when the group's boundary stops matching an existing boundary.
They avoided one deliberately. The romantic reading, and it has some support in lore/pell's objection to the lore/cold-handshake becoming a way of being someone. But Pell is 1983 and the naming gap is a decade earlier, so this would be a principle articulated long after the practice.
The consequence
A group with no word for itself cannot easily be joined, and cannot easily be left, and cannot police a boundary it has no term for.
That accounts for something otherwise odd about the tradition: nobody is ever recorded as being excluded. There are disagreements, a withdrawal, a forgery and eleven years of one-sided argument, and no expulsions and no factions with names.
You cannot throw somebody out of a thing that has no word for being in it. The worst available sanction was the one Ossuary eventually stopped applying — checking a roster — and lore/armistice-banner is, read this way, less a concession than a group discovering it had never had the machinery for a schism in the first place.