Students of
linguistics, literature and philosophy sooner or later get the idea that there
is an important distinction between the use of a word (any word) and its
mention. In print, the distinction can be marked by putting on punctuation
marks to indicate that a word is being mentioned (quoted); alternatively, it
can be italicised. The common purpose is to prevent confusion about who said
what. It also, in some circumstances at least, exempts someone who mentions a word
from any opprobium which might attach to it use. But it’s not always so simple.
A police officer is
giving evidence in the kind of ordinary court of law found in many countries, and
says at some point, “I then arrested him and he used a racist epithet”. Now
because the police officer is giving evidence and is not prosecutor, judge and
jury all at the same time, it is entirely legitimate and relevant to ask, “What
epithet?” To know it may be relevant to assessing the gravity of an offence.
The officer is only being asked to mention the word, to quote it, not use it
themself. It ought to be simple. Sometimes it isn’t and the police officer may
demur, “I don’t want to say the word”. In that situation, a judge may ask the
officer to write it down, knowing that this is usually acceptable even when saying
the word is not. The slip of paper may
then be passed silently to judge, prosecution, defence, and jury.
The officer’s hesitation may be prompted by different kinds of sensibility - they may simply not want to be party to circulating the word in any form, use or mention; they would like the word to go away and not saying it is a step in the right direction. Even if the officer does say it, a newspaper reporting the case will most likely not print it. Instead, a report may repeat the original “racist epithet” formula or, alternatively, print the word in a censored form, say, ******, which may be modified by providing one or two letters as clues.
This
curious practice of giving clues is a modification of the slip-of-paper
compromise: the reader now does not have to see the word, but is enabled to
infer it, and the more clues provided the less uncertain becomes the inference
until the word is staring you in the face. If you want to check the first line
of Philip Larkin’s poem, This Be The
Verse, online sources will offer you as the second word several versions:
“****”, “***k”, “f**k” and “f*ck”. It is an interesting question why anyone
should think “f*ck” preferable as an alternative to what Larkin actually wrote
in those heady days back in the 1970s when people were trying to say and write
what they meant. The obvious answer is that they now mis-quote it as “f*ck”
because they do not even want to see the word “fuck”, just as the police officer
did not want to hear the racist epithet even in the form of a mention.
Especially in relation
to speech, there may also be a fear that your audience might react in an
unwanted way. A police officer who says, “I then arrested him and he used a
fat-shaming epithet” may not want to mention the word or expression used simply
from anxiety that the court-room audience might not be sufficiently on guard to
suppress a titter. It’s possible that they have already had such a thought
about the unfortunate officer. An epithet can be well-chosen, even if
disgraceful or illegal.
There is a back story
relevant to the discussion. In all the main monotheistic religions, use or
mention of the name of God is hedged about with prohibitions, taboos, and
contextual requirements; it is one of the Ten Commandments that “Thou shalt not
take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him
guiltless that taketh his name in vain” (Exodus 20:7). This requires
interpretation, and indeed since it was first written down, many (millions
of?) man-hours - paid and unpaid - have
been devoted to its exegesis. One fairly common interpretation leads to the
conclusion that, really, one should not use the name of the **** at all, though
whether that is a matter of piety or prudence has also to be decided.
There is also a heresy
within Russian Orthodoxy which goes in the reverse direction. The name of God
should not be used carelessly because the name of God is God, rather in the way that some mathematicians think that the number
names are the numbers, without any
other kind of existence than the words we commonly employ.
Those who believe that
the name of God is God (the heresy is
still alive) are called Imyaslavtsy,
meaning Those who glorify the Name.
When in 1913 Nicholas the Second of Russia was told that Russian monks on Mont
Athos had become infected with the new heresy, he despatched a gunboat and two
transport ships to Mont Athos. The Archbishop of Vologda was put ashore and held
lengthy talks in which many monks identified themselves as heretics and refused
to recant. As a result, initiative was passed back to the repressive apparatus
of the Russian state. Troops came ashore, rounded up the heretics - killing
four, injuring around fifty - and eventually loaded over eight hundred monks
onto the ships for transport to Odessa where a few were found Not Guilty and
allowed to return to Athos; rather more were jailed; and the remainder
defrocked and sent into internal exile.
The use/mention distinction
easily gets forgotten. Exodus seems to
be quite clear about it: that one should not “take” the name seems to be a
claim (in that translation) that one should not use the name. Bu there is no
discussion of quotation. This is a pity because it could probably have saved a
lot of subsequent trouble. And it does seem that the Imyaslavtsy might have
misread John 1:1 as if it was saying, In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was “God”.
*
This little discussion
actually has an ultra-modern relevance. There has always been a part of
linguistics, notably that associated with the making of dictionaries, which has
interested itself in first uses of a word, subsequent developments in the way
the word is used, and in some cases, a word’s fall into disuse. Such corpus
linguistics was heavily dependent on printed texts and was extremely laborious
work. Modern computer-based data harvesting radically alters the situation:
provided it is online, truly huge amounts of data can be harvested with ease.
Take any word which, say, has recently become popular and it will be possible
to track its origins, its often-global dissemination, its typical users
(classified along any dimensions you like), and so on. But there is a catch.
Suppose I want to give an example of a newly popular word and choose
“genderfluid”. Then if what I write should appear online, a data-harvesting
program designed to pick up occurrences of the word will pick it up. But I
haven’t used the word; I have mentioned it. And unless the program is trained
to distinguish use and mention it cannot ground certain interpretations which
human users of the data might want to make. Unable to distinguish use and
mention, a program would not differentiate between such very different
occurrences of “genderfluid” as these:
(1)
I am genderfluid
(2)
I never use the word “genderfluid”; I
would not like to take it in vain.
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