Orin at B.U.; punting; Joelle (pp. 288–289)
that Salic law’d nothing to do with the fact that there was simply no way the late Headmaster’s beloved spouse and E.T.A. Dean of Academic Affairs and of Females Mrs. Avril Incandenza could have become Headmaster: how would ‘Headmistress’ have sounded?
Context
The book reaches all the way to Salic law — the inheritance rule that bars the widow's line — to explain why Avril didn't take the throne, and the reach is the joke and the tell at once. The stated reasons are all administrative and faintly absurd (her existing duties, her grief, "how would 'Headmistress' have sounded?"), and behind them sits the older machinery the Latin invokes: the crown passing to the brother, not the queen. That the school itself buries the point in an inaudible Convocation aside, drowned under ATHSCME fans, is perfect — the succession's legal scaffolding gets named precisely and then lost in noise, so that the Claudius arrangement can look like nothing but staffing.