The Socket and the Stamp consolidates the Sappho 31 material under strict axioms: the poem completes intentionally at the hanging line, and the dialect seam is held as physical and measurable rather than dissolved into abstract completion. Both errors — reading the seam as breakage, and dissolving it — are available, and the document commits neither.
The philological base. Seventeen Aeolic markers in seventy-four words, one per 4.4, sustained without lapse to φαίνομαι; then zero in six. A step, not a taper — decay predicts gradual thinning. Stated with the test that limits it: P(0 in 6) ≈ 0.209, one in five by chance, a constraint rather than a proof.
It corrects the governing brief on manuscript evidence. P reads παντόλματον — one word; the familiar πᾶν τολματόν is vulgo, already editorial. This strengthens the argument: a compound is more agentless than the split form, and Hermann's conjecture preserves it.
The seam as position. The sole witness writes the poem as continuous prose, so every printed boundary is editorial; and the modern section division falls between an accusative and the verb that governs it — πένητα is the object of θαυμάζεις, four words later.
The join is Longinus's own operation. At 10.6 Homer forces prepositions together παρὰ φύσιν; grammar forbids the join, so pressure performs it (συνθλίψις). The forged word ὑπὲκ θανάτοιο scans as neither element — which is why a filling made under load is not expected to scan.
The apparatus refitted. All three transmission nouns carry ἀπό- (ἀπήχημα, ἀπόρροια, ἀποτύπωσις), each a hapax, against ἐνετύπωσε at the one point the operation is performed. The die is a shaped absence; δυσεξάλειπτος is regenerability, not durability; and each filling opens a new socket, which is why the form propagates rather than merely persisting.