The vocabulary

Glossary

The whole framework runs on about twenty-five working terms. That is deliberate. Terminology proliferation was the largest stylistic risk in this project, and this list is the containment. Each term earns its place or it is not here.

Temporal Compensation Theory #: The expansion of compensation science that treats compensation as the transfer of purchasing power through time rather than merely the delivery of pay.
The Delivery Assumption Antagonist #: The inherited belief that compensation's obligations end at payroll: that what is delivered is what is received, and that everything after delivery belongs to some other discipline. Located in instruments and institutions, not in intentions.; Stated precisely: not an assumption economics failed to examine, but the assumption the design field failed to inherit the examination of.
The nominal fallacy #: The treatment of nominal value as economic value. The Delivery Assumption's day-to-day corollary, and the default output of every compensation system in use.
The compensation journey #: The unit of analysis: the full path a unit of labour's value travels, from the work that earns it to the life that spends it. Replaces the compensation event.
The Executive Exception #: The field's demonstrated rigour about pay's temporal architecture for the top five employees, and its silence about it for the other five thousand.
The Four Jobs #: Consumption, Protection, Alignment, Preservation. The exhaustive functional partition of delivered financial value at its stated level of aggregation. Three have a mature science. Preservation does not.
Durable compensation #: The instrument layer that serves the preservation job.
The carrier #: The instrument, wrapper and custody composition in which deferred value travels. A design variable, not a neutral container.
Preservation architecture #: The ten-layer stack that determines what arrives: instrument, wrapper, ownership, custody, contribution, defaults, pooling, tax, portability, conversion. Audited by the Six Tests.
The worker's future liability #: The preservation target: the stream of future obligations, tranched into floor, flexible and aspirational. Preservation is a relationship between assets and a future life, not a property of assets.
The Six Tests #: Arrival, Assignment, Ownership, Journey, Human, Conversion. Applicable to any preservation architecture, existing or not yet invented. Written before any candidate asset was named.
Property and promise #: The two poles of every carrier. Property carries; promises pool. Complements with different irreplaceable functions, not rivals.
Governed property #: Worker-owned claims with institutionally governed decisions. Property at the claim layer, stewardship at the decision layer.
Claim portability and architectural portability #: What crosses an employer boundary. Claim portability moves the balance. Architectural portability moves the whole stack: defaults, contributions, pooling, automation. The second is mostly a name for an absence, and Australian stapling is its first partial existence proof.
The authorship principle #: The employer is accountable for the architecture of its increment, never for the journey's outcome.
Stewardship #: As distinct from retention. The employer as outfitter rather than promisor: equipping a traveller for a journey the employer will not accompany to its end.
The adequacy gate #: Preservation instruments become offerable only behind funded present-pay adequacy: emergency liquidity in place, high-cost debt addressed, any available match captured.
The temporal audit, the leakage number, the stock column #: The three practice instruments. Record horizon, denomination and portability for every element. Measure the fraction of granted deferred value that survives departure. Report holdings beside spend.
The monetary denominator #: The unit compensation is both paid and measured in. The ruler is also the payment, and the ruler moves.
The denominator problem #: Nominal comparisons across long periods conceal the unit's movement, because the measurement is conducted in units of the leaking vessel.
The preservation burden #: The gap between zero and the real after-tax return on the safest accessible claim. When it is positive, standing still requires transformation or risk.
Preservation-motivated investment Shorthand: the forced investor #: The component of worker investment risk accepted in order to stand still rather than to move ahead. Defined counterfactually. Size unknown, and deliberately not estimated.
Portable monetary property #: An asset that is monetary in function and property at the value layer, with no named counterparty, portable across employers, providers and jurisdictions as a holding. A candidate-neutral category. Bitcoin qualifies only in direct or collaborative holding.
Delivered, Arrived and Perceived compensation #: The three registers. What the employer transfers; the liability-relative purchasing capacity surviving to intended use; and the employee's subjective valuation of it.
Temporal agency #: The normative standard. Employers owe agency over the timing and use of economic claims, not temporal choices made on workers' behalf. Legitimacy conditions: liability-anchored, documented, conflicts disclosed, exit preserved.
Time returned #: The telos of the whole framework: accumulated economic agency that reduces the future hours a person must sell. Operationalised cautiously as years to optionality.

Discipline

Vocabulary this work refuses to use

A glossary that only lists what a body of work says is doing half a job. Several attractive terms were tested during development and cut, and a few were prohibited outright. The reasons are more useful than the terms would have been.

Term	Status	Reason
Stored labour	Prohibited	Labour-theory-of-value coded, already claimed in the literature, and vulnerable to the input fallacy. Kocherlakota's money-as-memory is the safe anchor instead.
Temporal diversification	Prohibited	Collides fatally with the time-diversification fallacy that Samuelson and Bodie settled. Using it forfeits the argument to anyone who knows the literature.
Sovereign pension	Prohibited	Overclaims directly against the finding that Bitcoin is not a pension. The chapter carrying it was renamed.
Temporal compensation score	Prohibited	Pseudo-precision about preferences that cannot be measured at individual level. A plan-level audit summary is the honest version.
Temporal risk	Deleted	Redundant. Its probability definition repeats an error Bodie refuted in 1995, and the Arrival Test already does the work.
Temporal claim	Deleted	"Economic claim" needs no branding.
Temporal compensation curve	Deleted	One axis of the temporal audit, not a named construct. Avoids the infographic trap.
Temporal portfolio	Deleted	The composition principle covers it. Allowed as descriptive prose, never as a construct.
Preserved compensation	Renamed	Now arrived compensation, which says what it measures.
The temporal bargain	Frame only	Kept as a narrative frame. No formal claim in the theory rests on it.

There is one more prohibition worth stating, because it is the one most likely to appear in adjacent writing. This work never claims that Bitcoin lowers time preference. No empirical support for that exists. Saying so directly costs nothing and is worth more than the claim would have been.