ELSEVIER
Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59
Innuendo
David M. Bell*
Language Center, Nagoya University of Commerce and Business Administration, 4-4 Sagamine.
Komenoki-cho, Nisshin-shi, Aichi 470-01, Japan
Received January 1995; revised version January 1996
Abstract
Innuendoes most often arise at critical junctures of interaction which require speakers to
act in order to influence others yet to conceal their intentions in order to avoid the risks that
would be involved in their overt expression. Innuendoes may be venomous or non-venomous
depending on their aim. Venomous innuendo usually involves the public accusation of
another's impropriety and is most often found in political discourse. Venomous innuendo is
defined as a non-overt intentional negative ascription, whether true or false, usually in the
form of an implicature, which is understood as a charge against what is, for the most part, a
non-present party. The aim of the initiator of an innuendo is to smear the target of the innuendo by bringing about irrevocable changes in the belief systems of the intended recipients of
the innuendo. The use of innuendo as a means of attacking a target is the result of a calculation of the risks of explication together with the benefits of implication. Non-venomous innuendo, especially in the form of sexual innuendo, is also examined.
1. Introduction
During the US Senate debate to confirm Judge T h o m a s to the S u p r e m e Court, Senator E d w a r d K e n n e d y , in speaking o f the H i l l / T h o m a s Senate Judiciary Hearings,
noted that " T h e m o s t distressing aspect o f the hearings was the eagerness with which
m a n y o f Judge T h o m a s ' s supporters resorted to innuendoes and scurrilous attacks on
Professor Hill . . . " (quoted in Phelps and Winternitz, 1992: 401). Attributing innuendo to the verbal (or non-verbal) b e h a v i o r o f others is often intended as a charge o f
impropriety and a counter-attack to what are considered non-overt derogatory assertions. The use o f innuendo and the denunciations o f such use are quite c o m m o n in
areas o f political combat, yet little is k n o w n about what exactly constitutes the act o f
m a k i n g an innuendo and what linguistic properties allow us to identify it as such.
~ An earlier version of this paper was presented at the American Association of Applied Linguistics,
Baltimore, March 1994.
* Phone: +81 5617 3-211; Fax +81 5617 4-0341; E-mail: [email protected]
0378-2166/96/$15.00 Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved
PII S0378-2166(96)0002-1
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D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59
Research on innuendo, for the most part, has been undertaken in the fields of communications and social psychology, anthropology and literary criticism. In communications and social psychology, studies have been concerned with the cognitive
mechanisms of information processing, or what has been called the 'innuendo effect'
(Wegner et al., 1981; Wegner, 1984; Kassin et al., 1990). Anthropological studies
have examined innuendo as part of the wider notion of indirection, along with hints,
euphemisms, hyperbole, etc., and how such devices allow communities to express
conflicts without posing a threat to the social order which their direct expression
might engender (Brenneis, 1980; Garner; 1983; Evans, 1992; Obeng, 1994). And
literary criticism is rich in studies of how authors use metaphor, allegory, allusion,
and innuendo, etc., to communicate hidden messages to their readers (see Hollander,
1982, for a representative work in this field). Yet, little has been written about innuendo from the perspective of the pragmatics of utterance interpretation; that is to
say, what allows us to identify a particular verbal (and non-verbal) behavior as innuendo? In this paper, therefore, I want to describe the linguistic properties which constitute the notion of innuendo as an everyday description of a type of linguistic
behavior. In short, what I offer here is a definition of innuendo.
A classic example of innuendo concerns the story of a sea-captain and his firstmate (Fischer, 1970: 272). The captain, incensed by his first-mate's drunkenness,
wrote in the ship's log: "The first-mate was drunk all day". When the first-mate
read the log, he was naturally upset and confronted the captain. The captain replied:
"Well, it was true, wasn't it?". The following day the first-mate, whose normal
duties include writing up the ship's log, got his revenge. He wrote in the ship's log:
"The captain was sober all day". When he read the log-entry, the captain was furious at the implication in the first-mate's words that he was not normally sober.
When confronted by the captain, the first-mate, referring to his literal meaning rather
than the invited inference of his statement, replied: "Well, it was true, wasn't it?".
On the basis of examples like this, I want to define innuendo as follows: An innuendo is a non-overt intentional negative ascription, whether true or false, usually in
the form of an implicature, which is understood as a charge or accusation against
what is, for the most part, a non-present party. The decision to convey a message by
innuendo is the result of a calculation of the risks of explication together with the
benefits of implication. That is to say, the use of innuendo is conditioned by: (i) the
need to avoid the sanctions that might be brought against the speaker if the message
were explicitly conveyed, and (ii) the need to exploit the way in which an assertion,
placed surreptitiously in public consciousness, tends to shift the burden of proof onto
the target of the innuendo and brings about an irrevocable change in the belief system of the recipient with respect to the target regardless of whether the charges are
ultimately refuted or not.
Clearly, this definition does not account for all types of innuendo. Sexual innuendo, for example, does not consist of an accusation and does not deal with truth or
falsity. I take sexual innuendo to be a particular type of innuendo which I will deal
with after I have fully explicated my definition as it stands. In other words, I have
deliberately drawn my definition tight in order to account for what I consider to be
the major use of the word 'innuendo'. That is to say, innuendo is a verbal or non-
D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59
37
verbal strategy "for critical junctures, that is, for situations in which overt comment
or criticism would be improvident or improper but which demands some action on
the speaker's p a n " (Brenneis, 1980: 1). Now, the most critical juncture I take to be
the public accusation of another's impropriety, as in the case of the captain and the
first-mate. Other critical junctures include propositioning in the sexual market-place.
But innuendo, especially sexual innuendo, may also be used to create certain humorous and titillating effects and as such is often used as persuasive technique in advertising. Later I will loosen my definition to take into account sexual and other types
of innuendo whose use is not necessarily predicated on the critical juncture of
charges of impropriety. In other words, innuendoes like snakes may be classified as
venomous and non-venomous. What interests me here is the venomous type.
Before I go on to discuss this definition in more detail, I need to elaborate the theoretical framework on which my definition is based. And here I will spend some
time discussing the work of Austin (1962) and speech act theory. I do this for several reasons. First, although the classification of speech acts has turned out to be
somewhat of a dead end, I do find affinities between my attempts to elucidate the
rules of use of the everyday concept of innuendo and Austin's (1962) and Searle's
(1969) attempts to characterize what constitutes the rules of use of a whole range of
speech acts. Second, it seems to me that the making of an innuendo would seem to
be a prime example of how to do things with words. The first-mate's innuendo, for
example, might seriously damage the captain's career. Third, if innuendo can be
considered as an act, what I will later refer to as a 'pragmatic act' (Mey, 1993), then
a logical place to start is to examine how such acts are related to speech acts.
2. Innuendo and speech acts
Of course, the making of an innuendo cannot be considered a speech act, at least
not in the sense intended by Searle (1969). While recognizing Austin's further distinction of perlocutionary acts, Searle, for the most part, takes a speech act to be synonymous with an illocutionary act. According to Searle, "In the performance of an
illocutionary act the speaker intends to produce a certain effect by means of getting
the hearer to recognize his intention to produce that effect, and, furthermore, if he is
using words literally, he intends this recognition to be achieved in virtue of the fact
that the rules for using the expressions he utters associate the expressions with the
production of that effect" (1965 [1991: 259]). Of course, an innuendo requires that
the speaker's intent be not recognized (or at least not recognized as intended to be
recognized), and, therefore, an innuendo cannot be associated with the conventional
use of literal expressions. And even though many illocutionary acts in the form of
what Searle (1975) calls indirect speech acts need not be literally conveyed, the
achievement of the act is still predicated on the bearer's recognition of the speaker's
intent to create certain effects.
Nor can innuendo be considered as a speech act according to Austin (1962). Yet
Austin provides more fruitful grounds for discussion of innuendo as an act than
those who have focused solely on the illocutionary act. According to Austin, in addi-
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D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59
tion to the illocutionary act, which implies a locutionary act (the utterance of a sentence with determinate sense and reference), there is a third sense in which saying
something is doing something, namely, the perlocutionary act: "Saying something
will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings,
thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons: and it
may be done with design, intention, or purpose of producing them" (1962: 101).
According to Austin, perlocutionary acts include "convincing, persuading, deterring,
and even, say surprising or misleading" (1962: 109).
Although Austin's treatment of perlocutionary acts is tentative and undeveloped,
the discussion is valuable in that it underlines Austin's awareness that the illocutionary act by no means exhausts the ways in which speakers can do things with words.
What's more, it is interesting to note that innuendo does seem to have effects very
similar to what Austin describes as perlocutionary (though I do not wish to claim
that innuendo is a perlocutionary act). An innuendo is intended to produce certain
changes in the beliefs of the audience, and in the case of the sea-captain, beliefs
which could quite easily destroy his career. What is more, innuendo passes one of
the tests Austin suggests as a means for distinguishing between illocutionary and
perlocutionary acts, namely, that illocutionary acts can be prefaced by explicit performatives whereas perlocutionary acts cannot. So, according to Austin, we can say
"I warn you that" but we cannot say "I imply that" or "I insinuate that" (1962: 88).
Bach and Harnish suggest that this distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts is explained by the fact that unlike illocutionary intentions, perlocutionary intentions do not have to be recognized to be fulfilled (Bach and Harnish, 1979:
82). If this is the case, and if misleading can be counted as a perlocutionary act, then
it is difficult to understand why, within Austin's schema, innuendo falls outside the
category of perlocutionary act.
Austin is well aware of the dilemma:
"... there may be some things we 'do' in some connection with saying something which do not seem
to fall, intuitively, at least, exactly into any of these roughly defined classes, or else seem to fall
vaguely into more than one.... For example, insinuating, as when we insinuate something in or by
issuing some utterance, seems to involve some convention, as in the illocutionary act; but we cannot
say 'I insinuate ...' and it seems like implying to be a clever effect rather than a mere act." (Austin,
1962: 105)
It is hard to understand here what Austin means when he suggests that insinuating
"seems to involve some convention", especially as it fails his own test of conventionality: it cannot be made explicit by being prefaced by an explicit performative.
However, Austin suggests that such phenomena as evincing, intimating, insinuation,
and innuendo, though essentially different, often make use of the same or similar
verbal devices (1962: 75). It is certainly true that there are certain conventional verbal devices by which innuendo can be conveyed. A classic example is the Monty
Python character's use of the marker, Nudge nudge, wink wink. K n o w w h a t I mean ?
to signal an innuendo, in a similar way to the use of p l e a s e to mark an utterance as
a request. But, of course, the use of such devices makes for thinly veiled innuendo
and does not preclude the use of innovative and so unconventional devices. Yet, as
D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59
39
Strawson (1964) suggests, when Austin speaks of an illocutionary act involving convention, he cannot solely be referring to linguistic conventions.
Nor can it be said that by convention Austin is thinking of those kinds of institutionalized speech acts such as marrying, pronouncing a guilty verdict or naming a
ship, which can only be achieved by the uttering of the rights words, in the right
situation, by the right person. Bach and Harnish define convention as "a mutually
recognized means for doing something, counting as such only because mutually
recognized, perhaps by having been agreed upon" (Bach and Harnish, 1979: 109)
and refer to such speech acts as 'conventional illocutionary acts' in distinction to
what they call 'communicative illocutionary acts'. In such 'communicative illocutionary acts' as warning and entreaty, there need not be any convention other than
the linguistic conventions which help establish the meanings of the utterances as
locutionary acts. As Strawson (1964) suggests, therefore, for Austin to consider illocutionary acts in general as conventional, in the sense that they can be made explicit
by being prefaced by an explicit performative, there must be another notion of convention which Austin is considering.
According to Strawson what is common to both 'conventional' and 'communicative illocutionary acts' is that 'the illocutionary force of an utterance i s essentially
something that is intended to be understood. And the understanding of the force of
an utterance in all cases involves recognizing what may be called broadly an audience-directed intention and recognizing it as wholly overt" (Strawson, 1964 [1991:
300]). But if conventionality refers to the way in which speaker intentions in an iilocutionary act are overt, then we still seemingly have no grounds for understanding
why Austin should consider insinuation, in which intentions are non-overt, to
involve some convention. There are two answers, I believe, to this dilemma.
First, the distinction between conventional and communicative illocutionary acts
must be seen in terms not of distinct categories but in terms of a cline. Likewise, we
may consider non-overt acts also in terms of a cline. That is to say, in the case of
innuendo, that, although speaker intent is not intended to be recognized, i.e. it is nonovert, there are degrees to which that intent is recognizable. I characterize this scale
of non-overtness in terms of transparent and opaque innuendoes. So, the use of
sexual innuendo, especially in songs and advertising, may be said to be far more
transparent than, say, the use of innuendo in the courtroom, where recognition of an
attorney's intention to use innuendo by the judge would have serious consequences
for the attorney in question. And if overt and non-overt acts can be separately considered in terms of clines, why cannot they be considered as polarities of the same
cline? So, for example, at one end of the scale there might be an explicit accusation
such as "I accuse the captain of being drunk on board" and at the other end an insinuated accusation such as the first-mate's log entry. In other words, the more transparent the innuendo, the more it may be said to be conventional.
Second, Austin's insistence that, "the total speech act in the total speech situation
is the only actual phenomenon which, in the last resort, we are engaged in elucidating" (Austin, 1962: 148) suggests that the recognition of speaker intention is dependent on a whole range of contextual particulars and so is similar to the way in which
intentionality is ascribed to actions in general. Whether an utterance can be under-
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D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59
stood as a promise, therefore, is not just a matter of fulfilling a set of semantic rules
but of fulfilling a set of societal norms or conventions for what is considered the
action of promising. So three-year-olds, drunks and politicians may be judged incapable of making promises. And the less overt the intention, the greater is the importance of the contextual clues in determining that intention. So for example, in the case
of suicide, where there is merely the trace of an action, a judge has to reconstruct the
contextual particulars by reference to notes, life-histories, and information about the
position of the body, all of which enable him or her to say that an individual died as
a result of an intention (Coulter, 1989). So these contextual clues can be understood
as a set of conventions by which a death can be considered suicide. Likewise, the
determination of whether an utterance can be understood as innuendo is dependent on
the fulfillment of a set of inter-subjectively shared rules or conventions. Of course,
unlike suicide, these rules are not explicitly shared but nevertheless are publicly
available. It is the public criteria by which actions like innuendo are constituted that
makes them sui generis. As Mey argues, "It is actually society itself which 'speaks'
through the interactants when they try to influence each other" (Mey, 1993: 263).
The aim of this study, therefore, is to illuminate the conventions of use of the
everyday concept of innuendo by an examination of real occurrences of innuendo
and the context, linguistic and social, in which they appear. But before I can proceed
with my definition of innuendo, I need to conclude my discussion of speech act
theory by justifying my use of the term pragmatic act to describe innuendo.
3. I n n u e n d o is a pragmatic act
If, as we have seen, innuendo cannot be described as a speech act, either illocutionary or otherwise, what kind of an act is it? In their schema for speech acts, Bach
and Harnish (1979) describe innuendo as part of a wider category of 'covert collateral acts' within a larger category of 'non-communicative linguistic acts'. But to call
such acts as innuendo 'covert' and 'non-communicative' is to underestimate the
complexity of communication. Indeed, even within the speech act theory camp there
is disagreement as to where the line is to be drawn between speech acts and so-called
'non-communicative acts'. So according to Searle (1979), hinting cannot be counted
as a speech act whereas according to Holdcroft (1978), Wierzbicka (1987) and
Tsohatzidis (1989) it can.
It is clear that our everyday talk exchanges are made up of complex overlays of
verbal and non-verbal acts: some are readily interpretable due to the recognizable
social roles interactants play and the situations in which they are conventionally
expected to take place; others may be interpretable according to how the linguistic
communication conforms to what is understood to count as an offer, request or apology, etc., while still others may offer only faint clues and hints as to the speaker's
intent. Now, I want to describe these latter kinds of acts, which are situated towards
the non-overt polarity, as what Mey (1993) calls 'pragmatic acts'.
Mey uses the term pragmatic act to capture a whole range of ways - hints,
prompts, innuendoes, for example - by which interactants try to influence each
D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59
41
other, that are not identifiable as "a specific, codified language formula, such as a
'speech act' " (Mey, 1993: 5-6). My use of the term pragmatic act differs slightly
from that of Mey in that I use it to try to separate out non-overt acts from overt or
speech acts. Mey allows for a degree of overlap: "speech acts, when uttered in contexts, are pragmatic acts" (1993: 262). But as Mao (1995) points out, this implies
that speech acts are devoid of contextual associations when it is surely the case that
institutionalized speech acts, at least, cannot be disassociated from their felicity conditions or context. Pragmatic acts achieve their goals, i.e. influencing intended interactants in some predetermined way, not by getting them to recognize the speaker's
intent to produce those effects but by situating the act in a context such that the goals
of the interaction in general are derivable.
Pragmatic acts appear to have three main features: their non-overtness, their
contextual rootedness, and their ability to be denied or ignored. First, according to
Mey, in a pragmatic act "the interpretation of a particular utterance relies on the
context of goals, not just the communicative ones, but in general the goals of interaction" (1993: 262). So although the non-overt intent of the first-mate's log-entry
is not intended to be recognized as intended to be recognized, the goal of the interaction, namely, the invited inference that the captain is normally drunk, is clear.
Second, what allows us to understand the speaker's interactive goals is the context
in which pragmatic acts are rooted. Mey notes that "All pragmatic acts are heavily marked by their context: they are both context-derived, and context-restrained.
That means that they are determined by the broader social context in which they
happen, and they realize their goals in the conditions placed upon human action by
context" (1993: 264). So the first-mate's log-entry is understandable as innuendo
in the way that it violates the conventions of compiling a ship's log. Third, pragmatic acts can be denied or ignored in a way that direct and even indirect speechacts cannot, and this is dependent on the seriousness or plausibility of the pseudoovert meaning of the pragmatic act (I explore this point further in the next
section).
Let me give a further example of a pragmatic act, which I hope will capture something of the essence of irmuendo and preview some of my later discussion of sexual
innuendo (see Mey, 1 9 9 3 : 5 - 7 and 256-261 for further examples of pragmatic acts).
The homosexual practice of cruising is clearly an example of a critical juncture especially in homophobic environments. It is, according to Helms (1985), a 'disguised
exposing' whereby desires are revealed only to a selected few, usually by use of the
eyes - looking at a man longer than is normal for a man to look at another man.
Helms (1985: 65) quotes the following description of cruising by Walt Whitman,
which in itself is a pragmatic act:
Among the men and women, the multitude, 1
perceive on picking me out by secret and
divine signs ....
Some are baffled - But that one is not That one knows me.
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D.M. Bell /Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59
Lover and perfect equal!
I meant that you should discover me so, by my
faint indirections,
And I, when I meet you, mean to discover you
by the like in you.
Clearly, cruising is non-overt; it takes place often quite unrecognized in straight
society and brings about effects which appear to just happen: "I meant that you
should discover me so, by my faint indirections". And it is highly contextually
rooted, in that there are occasions where I may gaze longer than normal at other
males without being understood to be performing the pragmatic act of cruising.
What's more, the act of cruising is by nature of its non-overtness deniable or ignorable in case of a wrong discovery.
By using the term pragmatic act, I also want to avoid some of the confusion
which is associated with the notion of 'indirection', a term which is often used to
describe verbal behavior like innuendo. In the field of literature, indirection is widely
used to refer to the kinds of hidden messages authors use to draw readers into an intimate relationship, in the form of metaphor, allegory, allusion, and innuendo, as witnessed by the extract from Whitman. In linguistics, the term has been used in studies of an anthropological nature. According to Garner (1983), in his study of a black
community near Detroit, Michigan, by using indirection "the speaker, instead of
attacking the problem head-on sends a hidden-message to the audience. The message
is delivered as suggestions, innuendoes, implications, insinuations, or inferences"
(Garner, 1983: 235). Obeng (1994) in his study of verbal indirection in Akan, a language spoken in Ghana, defines indirection as "that communicational strategy in
which interactants abstain from directness in order to obviate crises or in order to
communicate 'difficulty', and thus make their utterances consistent with face and
politeness. Verbal indirection finds expression in such strategies as proverbs,
metaphors, innuendoes, euphemisms, circumlocution, and hyperbole" (Obeng,
1994: 42).
Whereas my use of the term pragmatic act is broadly in keeping with these writers' use of the term indirection, the use of the term indirection tends to include the
notion of indirect speech acts. In that most communication tends to be indirect, the
use of the term indirection in this sense, i.e. not direct, is weakened. So Evans (1992:
239), in his study of interjections in Mayali, an indigenous language of Australia,
defines 'overt indirection' as "the (pragmatically motivated) lack of formally
explicit coding of some aspect of a clause's meaning' ". Moreover, writers like
Searle (1975) and Brown and Levinson (1987) use indirection interchangeably with
indirect speech act. The use of the term is further compromised by its use in the
fields of rhetoric (see, for example, Farrell, 1976; Crew, 1987; Anderson, 1990) and
psychotherapy (Lankton and Zeig, 1989) to refer to modes of discourse which make
use of indirectness and circumlocution.
Now that I have identified innuendo as a pragmatic act, I want to go on to describe
the properties which allow us to say of an utterance that it is an innuendo.
D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59
43
4. Innuendo consists of a pseudo-overt and a non-overt meaning
Innuendoes, like indirect speech acts, consist of two elements: a literal and a nonliteral meaning. In speech act theory, this difference is between the direct and indirect or conveyed meaning. I use the terms overt or rather pseudo-overt meaning and
non-overt meaning. In this first sense, the first-mate's log-entry is recognizable as a
pseudo-overt intent to inform within the speech event of the log. So the entry "The
captain was sober all day" conforms to the informative function of log entries such
as "The sea was calm today", "Winds gusting from the north", "Average speed, 15
knots", etc. The second element or innuendo is an invited inference or non-overt
interpretation. If it is considered important enough to point out that the captain was
sober all day, the implication is that on some previous occasion or occasions he must
have been drunk.
However, innuendoes differ from indirect speech acts on several key points (see
Clark, 1979 [1991: 201] for a review of the properties of indirect speech acts). In an
innuendo, the pseudo-overt interpretation may comprise a direct and an indirect
meaning. So, for example, the first-mate's log entry might have read: "The captain
was clear-eyed, steady on his feet and his speech lucid". In which case the overt or
pseudo-overt meaning would consist of both a literal meaning and an indirect speech
act or circumlocution informing that "The captain was sober". Of course, there is
nothing to stop an indirect speech act from having a multiplicity of meanings and
several chains of such meanings. The crucial distinction here, of course, is that in the
non-overt interpretation, the speaker's intent is not intended to be recognized.
Another feature of indirect speech acts is that they make use of linguistic conventions. So there are conventions about which sentences can be used with which indirect speech acts, what Clark calls a "convention of means" (Clark, 1979 [1991:
201 ]). Clark also distinguishes convention of form, i.e. the degree to which a particular form is idiomatically associated with a particular function. As I have already
argued, innuendo, unless it is to be highly transparent and so conventional is not
usually associated with conventionality of means or form.
A further element of indirect speech acts is the degree to which the literal meaning can be said to be serious or implausible. In an innuendo there is likely to be a
greater need to attend to the seriousness and plausibility of the literal meaning than
in an indirect speech act. Indirect speech acts function, in part, because of the
implausibility of their literal meaning alone. Innuendoes, on the other hand, work by
maintaining a semblance of seriousness and plausibility in their literal or pseudoovert meanings. This allows speakers to both avow the pseudo-overt meaning and to
deny any non-overt meaning and, at the same time, it allows audiences to ignore
non-overt meanings.
Consider how deniability and ignorability function in the following extract from a
call-in radio talk-show, in which a caller uses a pseudo-information question to make
an assertion. Shrewd callers most often structure their turns in the form of a comment followed by a question, thus allowing the caller to get a longer turn than if they
had contented themselves with just a question. In the following extract, the caller has
just made a comment and now follows up with a two-part question. The question
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D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59
itself allows for a further opportunity to make a comment. What interests me here is
the caller's (C) obvious innuendo and the way the guest (G) and the host (H) deal
with the innuendo.
C: (a) But my two part question really quickly is
(b) Charles Krauthamer, who before he won
(c) I think some kind of Pulitzer prize for his column.
G: (d) I think 87 he won the Pulitzer
C: (e) Before that, he was a speech writer for Jimmy Carter's vice-president Mondale.
(f) Do you say anything in your book
(g) number one about
(h) how he [Charles Krauthammer] misappropriated
(i) Jimmy Carter's debate briefing
(j) debate briefing book
(k) who gave it to his buddy George Will,
(1) who gave it to Bill Casey and Ronald Reagan?
G: (m) Do you have any evidence for that?
C: (n) And number two
(o) do you say that half of the punditocracy
(P) including McLaughlin, Evans and Novak
(q) are off-the-shelf assets for the CIA?
G: (r) No, neither one of those things.
C: (s) Ok. Thanks.
H: (t) Hhhhhh. We'll let that stay where it is here.
(The Diane Rehm Show, WAMU, 8 October, 1992)
G's challenge in line (m) to the presupposition that Krauthammer misappropriated
Carter's debating brief is in a sense a legitimization of the assertion in that it
acknowledges that it has been 'heard'. The caller avoids responding to the challenge
in order, it would seem, to make his next assertion in the guise of a further question,
that the journalists McLaughlin et al. are working for the CIA. The second time
around the guest appears to think better of legitimizing the embedded assertion by
acknowledging it, and simply responds negatively in line (n) to the caller's explicit
yes/no question. The caller's curt, "Thanks" appears to signal satisfaction with the
fact that he has been allowed to make his point. And that seems to be echoed by the
host's reluctance to rise to the bait, and her desire to move on.
This last example also illustrates one further distinction between non-overt pragmatic acts and indirect speech acts. Whereas indirect speech acts may be said to be
motivated mainly from the perspective of politeness and face, innuendoes, especially
of the venomous type, are more concerned with the kinds of sanctions which may be
brought against the speaker. Note that the guest's helpful clarification in line (e) is
an example of, in Gricean terms, the cooperative principle of talk exchanges,
whereas the caller's view of the talk exchange is conflictual. As I have already suggested, the caller's closing "Thanks" hardly seems motivated by politeness.
D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59
45
5. The communicative intent of an innuendo is non-overt
Communicative intentions, as we have seen, can be said to be overt when the
speaker intends that his/her intent be recognized, while at the same time the hearer
assumes that the speaker intends for his/her communicative intent to be recognized.
In such a case the speaker's intent can be called, to use Sperber and Wilson's term,
"mutually manifest" (1986: 61). So, although 1 might indirectly comment on the
chilliness of the room, I am not necessarily trying to conceal my communicative
intent to get you to shut the window.
This is not the case with regard to such non-overt pragmatic acts as innuendo.
According to Bach and Harnish, such acts succeed "only if their intent is not
recognized, or at least not recognized as intended to be recognized" (1979: 101).
So, although the communicative intent of the first-mate may be recognizable, at
least to the captain, it is certainly not the first-mate's intention that his communicative intent be recognized in the sense of indirectly asking someone to close the
window.
What is essential to remember in the distinction between overt and non-overt
intentions is, as I have already suggested, that they exist as polarities of a cline.
In reality, utterances may convey multiple intentions with varying degrees of overtness. Likewise innuendoes may vary in their degrees of non-overtness, as is suggested by Bach and Harnish's definition. In fact, those innuendoes - most often in
the form of rumor (see section 9) - which succeed only if their intent is not recognized constitute a limited set of innuendoes. For the most part, innuendoes succeed
only if the intent is recognized, or rather suspected. So in defining how insinuating
operates, Strawson argues that "The whole point of insinuating is that the audience
is to suspect, [author's italics] but no more than suspect, the intention, for example,
to induce or disclose a certain belief. The intention one has in insinuating is essentially non-avowable" (1964 [ 1991 : 297]). Or to use Whitman's apt description: " M y
words itch at your ears till you understand them" ('Song of Myself', 1246 (quoted in
Helms, 1985: 66)).
It may be easier to grasp this notion of non-overtness, especially in this second
and main sense in which the intent is not recognized as intended to be recognized,
by reference to the metaphorical use of the word veil. Innuendo is sometimes
described as 'thinly veiled'. The New York Times described Marilyn Quayle's comment (in her 1992 Republican Convention address) that in the 1960s "not everyone
demonstrated, dropped out, took drugs, joined in the sexual revolution or fled to
Canada" as "gossamer innuendo" (August 20, 1992: A18). Gossamer is a very delicate form of gauze, and some types of veils consist of light and flimsy gauze. Such
veils do not so much conceal the face but rather tantalize by suggesting the intention,
if not the reality, of hiding the face. Similarly much innuendo tantalizes by the way
that speakers make their intent sufficiently transparent while at the same time suggesting their intention to conceal their intent.
46
D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59
6. Innuendo is a type of conversational implicature
Implicature refers to the way that utterances convey meanings not signaled by the
explicit propositional content. Grice (1975 [ 1991: 306]) gives the following example
of what he calls a conversational implicature: suppose that A and B are talking about
a mutual friend, C, who is now working in a bank.
A: How is Charlie getting on?
B: Oh quite well, I think; he likes his colleagues, and he hasn't been to prison yet.
Grice notes that whatever B implied is quite distinct from what B said, in the same
way that what the first-mate said is quite distinct from what he implied. In Grice's
example, B appears to be indicating that C is dishonest in the same way that the firstmate implies that the captain was drunk.
Now, we might agree that the above example taken from Grice may also be
considered an innuendo. As such innuendo can be seen as one type of conversational
implicature. However, it should be noted that implicature is a general abstract
phenomenon which describes the linguistic mechanism by which verbal behavior,
not just innuendo, may be indirectly achieved. Innuendo, on the other hand, is a
manifestation of the use of implicature in a particular form of social behavior. As
such the social properties of innuendo tend to distinguish it from the logical properties of implicature. And this is the case with respect to what has been held to be the
most prominent distinguishing characteristic of a conversational implicature: cancellability.
According to Grice, one way of testing for a conversational implicature is that it
can be canceled without creating a semantic contradiction between the implication
and its denial. So the implicature of the first-mate's can be canceled or denied by
adding: "But I don't mean to say that he was drunk before". But although the implicature may be semantically canceled, can it be said that the innuendo is canceled?
Consider Marilyn Quale's innuendo at the 1992 Republican Party Convention similarly canceled.
[In the 1960s] not everyone demonstrated, dropped out, took drugs, joined in the
sexual revolution or fled to Canada. But I d o n ' t mean to say that anyone in the
D e m o c r a t i c Party did this.
The innuendo would not be canceled but made explicit. Indeed, the cancellation, or
at this level, denial, may be considered a more transparent innuendo. Whereas canceling a conversational implicature may involve the articulation of what is already
considered to be mutually manifest, the cancellation or denial of an innuendo articulates and so makes more explicit what is considered to be non-mutually manifest.
A classic example of the way in which the non-overt message in an innuendo
can be made explicit by an act of apparent cancellation occurred in the 1992 Presidential election. During the campaign, President Bush's deputy press officer,
Mary Matalin, was criticized for putting out what was described as a 'snarling'
D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59
47
press release attacking Bill Clinton. In an interview with the press, Matalin
defended herself against accusations of sleaze: " W e ' v e never said to the press that
he's a philandering, pot smoking draft dodger" ( N e w York Times, August 5, 1992:
A22).
Of course, not all innuendo can be said to be a conversational implicature. Innuendo which requires that its intent not be recognized, i.e. in the form of a rumor, cannot be said to be a conversational implicature. And if the intent is not recognizable
then it cannot be said to be calculable. 'Calculability', according to Grice, is a further test of a conversational implicature: "One has to produce an account of how it
could have arisen and why it is there" (Grice, 1981: 187). Furthermore, whereas
innuendo may take the form of a whole discourse rather than a particular utterance,
it is not quite clear whether implicature can similarly operate on linguistic units
larger than the utterance.
7. There are no formal linguistic requirements for innuendo
Other than the ability of an utterance to carry at one and the same time a pseudoovert and a non-overt message, there are no formal linguistic requirements for innuendo. Now, the research in the field of communications and social psychology takes
a different view. Writers like Wegner, Wenzlaff, Kerker and Beattie (1981) argue
that an innuendo can be defined in terms of two critical structural features: (a) a
statement about a person and (b) a qualifier about the statement in the form of a
question or denial, etc. So the utterance: "I certainly wouldn't suggest that Jones is
a racist" consists of a statement: Jones is a racist and a qualifier: I certainly
wouldn't suggest it. Studies suggest that subjects are more likely to retain the statement rather than the qualification of the statement. This is called the 'innuendo
effect'. The innuendo effect suggests that a denial in the form of: "Senator Denies
Forcing Himself On Hairstylist", would only be slightly less damaging than "Senator Forces Himself On Hairstylist".
Such studies, therefore, are concerned with the cognitive mechanisms by which
individuals process language. Clearly, the notion of innuendo I am exploring here
has to do with the pragmatics of utterance interpretation rather than the cognitive
effects of language processing. Much innuendo like the first-mate's innuendo, for
example, consists of only a statement and no qualification. And what makes the
utterance: "I certainly wouldn't suggest that Jones is a racist" interpretable as innuendo is not so much its structure but the bearer's contextual knowledge of who the
speaker is, who the speaker is talking about, and the situation in which the remark is
made, etc., together with whatever non-verbal clues such as intonation and facial
expression that accompany the utterance. In other words, innuendo as a pragmatic
act is contextually rooted.
As a further illustration of the variety of forms that can be used to convey innuendo, consider the remarks made during the Hill/Thomas Judiciary Hearing by Senator Alan K. Simpson with regard to Anita Hill, and later denounced by Senator
Kennedy.
48
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
(e)
(f)
(g)
(h)
(i)
(j)
(k)
(I)
(m)
D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59
And now I really am getting stuff over the transom about Professor Hill.
I've got letters hanging out of my pocket.
I've got faxes.
I've got statements from her former law professors,
statements from people who know her,
statements from Tulsa, Oklahoma, saying, "Watch out for this woman."
... So if we had 104 days to go into Ms. Hill
and find out about her character, her background, her proclivities, and all
the rest,
I'd feel a lot better about this.
And I'm talking about the stuff I'm getting from women in America
who are sending me things
and especially women in Oklahoma.
Well, that'll all become public.
There is the wonderfully mysterious imagery of stealth in the phrase "getting
stuff over the transom" - a nice example of words "itching at the ear to be understood"; the hyperbole of " I ' v e got letters hanging out of my pocket"; the ambiguity of the phrase "Watch out for this woman" - is she evil or impressive?;
the connotative use of the word "proclivities", a code-word for (homo)sexual
preferences; and finally, the exploitation of the fuzzy reference inherent in generic
plural nouns - just how many letters, faxes and statements did Simpson receive,
was there really more than one statement from Tulsa saying "Watch out for this
woman", and just how many women constitute "Women in America" and "Women
in Oklahoma" ?
Of course, the innuendo here is not solely derived from any one discrete form but
rather from the discourse as a whole. The manipulation of language at the discourse
level, therefore, as opposed to the sentence level, may be the source of the innuendo,
and as such, suggests a formal complexity far beyond the relatively simple structure
of statement and qualifier.
8. An innuendo is a non-overt negative ascription
Research in the field of communications and social psychology has taken the
notion of 'innuendo effect' to somewhat absurd lengths with the suggestion that
there can be 'positive' innuendoes (Wegner, 1984). So, it is argued that in the utterance: "Roy did not give an elderly man some money" the 'positive' innuendo: Roy
gave an elderly man some money is retained. However, from the point of view of the
pragmatics of utterance interpretation rather than the cognitive effects of language
processing, a defining feature of innuendo of the venomous kind is its negative
ascription. What distinguishes innuendo from insinuation, for example, is that insinuations, while also non-mutually manifest, can take the positive form of flattery and
ingratiation.
D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59
49
9. Innuendo is an intentional pragmatic act
This may seem to state the obvious after the transparency of the use of innuendo
in the Simpson example, but let me amplify the point further. During the 1956 presidential campaign, Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate, arrived at a Chicago
airport, to be greeted by a crowd of supporters amongst whom was a very pregnant
woman carrying a large sign reading: "STEVENSON IS THE MAN" (Fischer,
1970: 272). Now, I do not consider this an example of innuendo in the same way I
do not find it an example of wit. It is an example of humor rather than wit, if by wit
we mean an intentional humor producing act. Of course, if the woman had been
working for the Republican dirty tricks department, we might indeed claim this as an
example of innuendo.
However, this notion of innuendo as an intentional communicative act again contradicts the view of innendo in the fields of communications and social psychology.
Here innuendo is synonymous with rumor. Sabato (1991) gives the following example of how innuendo/rumor is exploited by political smear campaigns. In the 1988
presidential campaign, with Bush trailing in the polls, Republican operatives started
calling their reporter contacts with regard to a rumor about Dukakis's mental health
problems. According to Steven Roberts of US' N e w s & W o r m Report: "They asked
us, 'Gee, have you heard anything about Dukakis's treatment? Is it true?' They're
spreading the rumor, but it sounds innocent enough; they're just suggesting you look
into it, and maybe giving you a valuable tip as well" (Sabato, 1991: 152). And
reporters who call around attempting to verify or debunk the rumor inevitably end up
disseminating it even further. The end result may well have been a headline which
read: "Dukakis Denies Mental Health Problems". And this is precisely the aim of
such campaigns.
The question is whether a meaningful distinction can be made between the political operatives' use of an utterance such as "Have you heard anything about
Dukakis's treatment?" and that of a reporter like Steven Roberts. And clearly there
is. In the same way that the pregnant woman holding the Stevenson sign can be
defended against charges of innuendo on the basis of the absence of intent so too can
Steven Roberts. And this judgment is based not so much on any formal evidence but
rather on our contextual knowledge of the speakers involved and the situation in
which the utterance is made. Clearly, there is an overlap between innuendo and
rumor, but this is an indication of the fuzzy edges of such everyday concepts and not
an indication that innuendo can coexist with the absence of intent to make an innuendo. Such an intentional view of innuendo is supported by the present legal view of
innuendo and defamation in the USA (Smolla, 1986; Fremlin, 1991).
10. Innuendoes may vary in their degree of transparency and opacity
According to Sperber and Wilson (1986), speakers not only make decisions about
whether to convey meanings explicitly or by way of implicature but also about the
extent to which they will constrain the hearer's calculation of the implicature. Blake-
50
D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59
more argues that "The tighter the constraint the speaker imposes on the bearer's
choice of contextual assumptions, the stronger the resulting implicatures. The less
tight the constraint, the weaker the resulting implicatures" (Blakemore, 1992: 129).
Likewise, it is possible to talk about strong and weak innuendoes, although here I
prefer to speak of this difference in terms of transparency and opacity - the stronger
the implicature the more transparent the innuendo. A similar distinction is captured
by the terms 'gentle' and 'broad' with regard to hints. For the most part, initiators of
innuendoes are torn between the need to constrain the bearer's calculation of the
intended non-overt message in terms of a transparent innuendo, and the need to protect themselves against charges of making non-overt derogatory assertions (like
those made by Senator Kennedy) by making their innuendo sufficiently opaque so
that such charges are at best avoided or at least can be plausibly denied.
Of course, the transparency or opacity of an innuendo does not reside solely in its
linguistic form. As I have already argued, the bearer's calculation of an utterance
will also be constrained by the contextual knowledge of who the speaker is, where
the speaker is speaking and the topic of his or her discourse. Brenneis (1980)
describes how in Bhatgaon, an Indo-Fijian community, a common occasion for
innuendo are parbachan, speeches with ostensibly religious content given at weekly
mandali, or prayer meetings. What allows the audience to identify the use of innuendo in these speeches is a combination of the audience's knowledge of who the
speaker is, the speaker's reference to particular topic areas such as anger and jealousy, and the use of indefinite pronouns: koi 'some(one)' and kya 'some(thing)'.
Similarly Marilyn Quayle's innuendo can rightly be called 'gossamer innuendo' both
because of the familiar, even clich6d formal mechanism of indirect reference that she
employs and because of what we know of her political affiliations and the setting in
which her remarks are made. Likewise, Senator Simpson's remarks in the Hill/
Thomas Judiciary Hearings may be considered to be even more transparent examples of innuendo. Indeed, the transparency of Simpson's innuendo could be interpreted as failed innuendo. The subsequent outcry against his remarks forced him to
make a public apology. On the other hand, Judge Thomas was confirmed to the
Supreme Court in part due to the success of the attacks against Anita Hill.
Somewhat less transparent is the first-mate's innuendo. Although the captain
could justifiably claim that the log-entry: "The captain was sober today" invites the
inference that the captain is usually drunk, the first-mate could claim that any number of implicated conclusions could be drawn from the same entry. So, for example,
the first-mate could claim that the intended implication was that the rest of the crew
were drunk but the captain remained sober. As Sperber and Wilson suggest, "the
weaker the implicatures, the less confidence the hearer can have that the particular
premises and conclusions he supplies will reflect the speaker's thoughts" (1986:
200). This notion has important ramifications with regard to lawsuits based on
defamation through innuendo. If it can be shown that an innuendo can be interpreted
as implying various propositions (and by definition innuendo must consist of at least
two interpretations), then a defendant can always deny that the proposition that most
clearly defames is the one that was intended. (See Saenz v. Playboy Enterprises, Inc.
841 F.2d 1309 [7th Cir., 1988].) The captain would find that if he sought legal
D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59
51
redress against the first-mate for defamation by innuendo, his suit would not be considered actionable.
Longer stretches of text in which the innuendo is derived from the discourse as a
whole rather than from a particular sentence or utterance allow for greater opacity.
The following example is taken from an article in the Washington Post under the
headline: "Ex-Dyson Aides Recall Unorthodox Demands" (May 1, 1988: A1, A33,
A34). Roy Dyson was at the time a Democratic Congressman from Maryland. The
article, however, is concerned with Dyson's chief-aide, Tom Pappas, and leaves the
distinct impression that Pappas is homosexual. However, the innuendo that I am interested in here concerns Dyson too. A section devoted to background information about
Pappas' professional association with Dyson concludes with the following paragraph.
Dyson's official residence is in St. Mary's County, but he frequently stays at
Pappas' large frame-house in Accokeek in Prince George's County, according to
a neighbor and former staff members. Dyson is single and Pappas was divorced in
1982 (A33).
Clearly, the calculation of the innuendo here, that both Dyson and Pappas are
homosexuals, has to be made in the context of the article as a whole. But even in this
short extract, it is possible to arrive at the same inference by questioning both the relevance and the juxtaposition of information about Dyson and Pappas' marital status
and their living arrangements and the need to corroborate this latter detail by referring to the source of the information. Of course, the Post could claim that the information about their marital status merely served as an innocent explanation why
Dyson often stayed with Pappas. But the implication was clear. At a news conference some days after the article appeared, Dyson was asked to describe the exact
nature of his relationship with Pappas and whether he and Pappas were homosexuals
(Washington Post, May 2, 1988: A1, AI0).
11. The target of an innuendo is rarely the addressee
For the most part, innuendo of the venomous type is rarely aimed directly at the
target of the innuendo, but is rather addressed to those whose beliefs the initiator is
trying to affect. No doubt, this reluctance to address the target directly is because of
the essential volatility of the charges involved in innuendo and the overriding aim to
inflict harm by surreptitiously disseminating those charges in public. Furthermore,
the difference in contextual knowledge which exists between the initiator and the target of an innuendo on the one hand, and the initiator and the recipient of the innuendo on the other, will have a crucial effect on whether an utterance is indeed considered to be innuendo. Consider the following extract from the TV column of the
Washington Post. The column describes a dispute between the comedian Roseanne
Arnold and TV critic Matt Roush of the Los Angeles Times. Arnold had written to
Roush to protest his harsh criticism of a comedy special starring her then-husband
Tom Arnold. She wrote:
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D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59
You stupid little asinine, arrogant slug ... PS. you are not in a position to understand
or criticize anything about heterosexuals. (Washington Post, December 9, 1992: C8)
I want to say that there is something essentially different about this utterance in the
context of a private communication between Arnold and Roush and the public context of a TV column in the Washington Post. On the private level the post-scriptum
might be described as a dig or snide remark while on the public level, it is more
readily describable as an innuendo. On the private level, Arnold may well be making an indirect reference to knowledge which is already considered shared - Arnold
knows that Roush knows that Arnold knows that Roush is a homosexual - or she
may be signaling that the knowledge has now become shared. On the public level,
the reader is less concerned with the degree of shared knowledge between Arnold
and Roush than with inputs to the reader's own knowledge or belief systems.
Obviously, however, there are situations in which innuendoes are addressed to
targets which are present. Still, these are, for the most part, formal public speech
events such as political debates or court cases in which the target's freedom to
respond is mediated. The target of the innuendo in parbachan speeches in IndoFijian communities may or may not be present; what is important is that the innuendo aims to encourage the intended recipients to intervene and bring an end to a
dispute (Brenneis, 1980). In American court cases, the use of presumptuous or leading questions in cross-examinations may serve the sole purpose of "wafting unwarranted innuendo into the jury box" (Underwood and Fortune, 1988: 346). Here, the
addressed target may be the defendant or a witness whom counsel seeks to discredit
in the eyes of the jury, the intended recipients of the innuendo, i.e. those whose
belief systems the initiator hopes to affect.
Another occasion in which the targets of the innuendoes may be present is where
the aim of the innuendo is to bring about cooperation between the initiator and the
target of the innuendo rather than conflict, as is the case with parbachan. In such a
situation the innuendo may sting rather than poison. Garner (1983) describes how
the black rhetorical device of 'signifying' - the use of verbal messages consisting of
ambiguous, indirect, and multi-level meanings to needle, embarrass or make fun of
someone - can be used as a means of creating cooperation by allowing community
members to air and work out their grievances with each other without threatening
their relationships. Similarly, according to Obeng (1994), the use of akutia (innuendoes) by the Akan speakers of Ghana allows interactants to talk about delicate issues
or to settle personal scores. In both cases, a key feature is that references to the target are deliberately obscured by the use of the kind of fuzzy reference used by Marilyn Quayle and in the parbachan. In this way, targets are required to respond in a
similar ambiguous fashion so that delicate issues are aired.
12. Initiators, conveyors, targets, recipients, and censors
Following Goffman's model of communication (1981: 132-134), the participants
in innuendo may be seen to play a number of separate or combined roles as initia-
D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59
53
tors, conveyors, targets, recipients, and censor's. Recipients of the innuendo may be
intended recipients or non-intended recipients. Intended recipients are those recipients whose belief systems the initiator especially wishes to change through the use
of the innuendo. Initiators will also be aware that there will be other recipients of the
innuendo, but these may not be the recipients whose belief systems the initiator
intends to affect; these are non-intended recipients. Recipients, either intended or
non-intended, consist of addressed or unaddressed recipients. In the Hill/Thomas
hearings, the non-intended recipients of Simpson's innuendo were his addressed fellow senators on the committee; the intended recipient was the 'unaddressed' TV
audience. Censors are those with the power to bring sanctions against the initiator.
Censors are not necessarily the same as the target. In the Hill/Thomas affair, the
potential censors, apart from Hill herself, were both the non-intended recipients - the
senators, and the intended recipients - the TV audience. In a court-case, the censor
is the judge guarding against possible dirty tricks.
In the Arnold-Roush example cited earlier, as a private communication, there is
no distinction between the initiator and the conveyor of the 'innuendo' on the one
hand, and the recipient, target, and censor on the other. While the initiator and the
conveyor are often not separable, the recipient and target are, and it is this lack of
role separation which helps explain why in the form of a private communication
Arnold's post-scriptum would probably not be considered innuendo. In the context
of the Washington Post, whereas Roseanne Arnold and Matt Roush remain the initiator and the target of the innuendo respectively, the newspaper or at least the column becomes the conveyor, the readers the recipients, and both the newspaper and
the readers become the potential censors. It is not quite clear here who has gained by
the elevation of this private communication to the level of the public domain. Has
Arnold gained by spreading the innuendo or has Roush gained by censuring it?
13. The risks of explication and the benefits of implication
The decision to convey a message by innuendo appears to be the result of calculating the risks of explication of the negative ascription together with the benefits of
implication. Clearly, the risks involved in the explicit conveyance of a charge are the
sanctions that might be brought against the speaker by the various censors. These
sanctions might consist of an immediate challenge and subsequent loss of face, physical threat, legal proceedings for libelous or slanderous statements, or even disbarment as in the case of the legal profession. The benefits, other than avoiding the risks
involved in an explicit statement, are the way in which successful innuendo shifts the
burden of proof onto the target of the innuendo and the way in which the charges
implied by the innuendo have a permanent staining effect on the target.
The use of innuendo is an obvious ploy were the speaker lacks the evidence to
corroborate the charge, especially in the light of the fact that there can be no defamation by innuendo. Simpson, despite his letters and faxes, knew that he had no concrete evidence against Hill. The author of one of these letters, which Simpson had
described as "the most derogatory letter I have seen to date" (New York Times,
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D.M. Bell /,lournal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59
October 14, 1991: A17), later revealed that the letter consisted of 'third hand' information. Asked whether Simpson had characterized her letter correctly, the author,
one of "the women of Oklahoma", replied with tit-for-tat innuendo that "People
make different interpretations of things. I don't want to call Senator Simpson a liar.
I don't know what else he was referring to. It would not be the way that I would
characterize the letter" (A 17).
However, the decision to use innuendo is not solely determined by the lack of evidence for the charge. The decision to insinuate rather than assert that public officials
are homosexuals, for example, may be due to the assumption on the part of the initiator that the explicit conveyance of the charge would expose the initiator to censure
- charges of homophobia - and this may be the case regardless of whether there is
evidence to prove the charge.
On the other side of the calculation, one of the great benefits of innuendo is that,
whether evidence exists or not, the burden of proof is shifted onto the target. It was
not the Washington Post that was asked to corroborate the innuendo that Dyson was
a homosexual but Dyson himself. At the same time, one of the problems with Simpson's innuendo against Hill was that he failed to fully shift the burden of proof onto
Hill. This was partly due to the vagueness of the charges Simpson was implying, but
also due to the fact that he claimed to have evidence - faxes, letters and statements
- which could corroborate his charges. The burden of proof, therefore, remained
with Simpson to produce this evidence. When he refused to do so, much of his case
collapsed.
Furthermore, the insidious effects of innuendo can often be far more devastating than the explicit assertion of a charge. Innuendo has an inherent perlocutionary effect of staining the target by creating a lingering suspicion or doubt
by bringing about an irrevocable change in the recipient's belief system. Even
when the charge implied by an innuendo is refuted, certain doubts will remain,
which will continue to have a deleterious effect on the target of the innuendo.
However baseless the charges of the first-mate are found to be, if indeed they
are so explicitly examined, a prudent ship-owner might well decide to avoid
entrusting the wrongly defamed captain with command of an oil-tanker. For
while the culpability of the initiator of the allegation may be forgotten, the sticking power of the allegation remains. In the Hill/Thomas affair, despite Simpson's
failure to fully shift the burden of guilt, Thomas was believed by a margin of
two-to-one.
And some cunning initiators of innuendo deliberately exploit this staining effect.
Politicians are well aware that their remarks will be widely reported and by the time
a denial or a retraction is made, the innuendo will be well-established. Yet, as we
have noted, even where a denial of the charges is quite explicitly made and registered, the result may be to harden the staining effect. Lyndon Johnson is reputed to
tell a story about a congressman who, up for re-election, got his press secretary to
put out a lurid story about his opponent's sexual behavior. When the press secretary
questioned the congressman as to what proof he had for the story, the congressman
replied: "Don't bother me with proof. Just get him to deny it" (Wall Street Journal,
June 20, 1989: AI6).
D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59
55
14. Sexual innuendo
As I indicated at the beginning of this paper, the definition of innuendo which I
have been using has been drawn deliberately tighter than a definition which would
account for innuendo in general. The critical juncture which motivates the use of
innuendo in the examples I have discussed so far involves an attack on another, and
this juncture is most often instantiated in political discourse. In order to loosen my
definition to take into account other forms of innuendo, especially sexual innuendo,
other critical junctures need to be examined.
As my example of cruising has suggested, a common critical juncture in our
everyday lives is propositioning in the sexual market-place. Although propositioning
in the heterosexual market-place may be much less fraught than in the homosexual
one, it still poses an interactional discomfit such that interactants resort to various
strategies to disguise their desires so that they can be either denied or ignored. Walle
(1976) suggests that the telling of sexual jokes in itself can suggest sexual interest on
the part of the speaker in the listener and the continued participation of the listener
may suggest reciprocation of that interest. Walle suggests that the participants are
exchanging coded messages about sexual availability and can move toward personal
intimacy without risk of losing face.
A similar pattern of interaction is decribed by Garner (1983). In the following
example, three customers in a restaurant begin 'signifying' just loud enough for the
waitress, Beverley (B), to hear. They use food and eating as synonyms for sex, and
one of the customers, Mack Man (MM), invites Beverley for breakfast. Beverley
asks where they would go and when Mack Man suggests somewhere quiet, Beverley's rejoinder shows that she has caught on to the signifying.
I like a crowd around me when I'm eating. Makes it more enjoyable. Nothing
satisfies a woman more than to have men on all sides of her eating.
MM: I guess we'll have to get more cooks because these fellows here can eat up
some eating. I mean they can work four or five cooks to death in no time.
(Walking away) One good cook can satisfy a whole bunch of hungry men.
B:
(Garner, 1983: 242).
B~
The innuendo here, of course, is highly transparent, and yet highly innovative, and
once again the groundwork for an actual proposition is being made. The dexterity by
which the innuendo is maintained and extended is indicative of the kinds of linguistic resources that speakers have access to and the degree to which verbal artistry is
prized.
A further critical juncture may involve the mere talking about topics which are
considered taboo. Consider the dilemma in which Walt Whitman found himself in
nineteenth-century United States. As a poet he needed to speak openly of his experiential life, yet if he did so, he risked social condemnation if not violence and, of
course, the public acclaim for his work. Whitman's solution to the dilemma is
expressed in the epigraph: "He is wisest who has the most caution, He only wins
who goes far enough" (quoted in Helms, 1985), a motto for all would-be initiators
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D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59
of innuendo. According to Helms, Whitman set about speaking of his homosexuality
through an elaborate system of disguises - hints, clues and indirections - which for
a century and a quarter successfully concealed his most intimate thoughts, "saving
straight readers from the discomfits of fag meanings" (Helms, 1985: 63).
What has changed in the reading of Whitman over the years then is that the innuendoes have become increasingly transparent as the knowledge and beliefs that the
reader brings to the interpretive process have changed. And, of course, this changing
belief system is due in part to the eroding of the taboos which attend to the discussion of homosexuality and sexuality in general. As a result, it may be said that the
function of the innuendo has changed from protection to that of ornamentation. In
other words, Whitman's use of innuendo and indirection in general can now be
appreciated as a clever effect, to echo Austin's words, verbal artistry akin to the
lounge signifiers.
And this brings us to a major use of innuendo, and especially sexual innuendo, as
a persuasive technique in advertising. Brooke Shields' line in a Calvin Klein jeans
commercial: "Want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing",
had enough sexual innuendo to cause both a controversy and record sales (Chicago
Tribune, September 24, 1990, p. C2). There appear to be four components for the
success of sexual innuendo in advertising like this. First, of course, is the titillation
of public references to taboo topics like underwear or the lack of it. Second, sexual
innuendo like the use of indirection in literature helps create a relationship of intimacy between the ad and those who are privy to its hidden meanings. Third, sexual
innuendo exploits the general principle of co-option; hearers are likely to identify
with the use of verbal artistry. And finally, the right amount of opacity of the innuendo allows the invited inference to be either denied or ignored. And by the same
token, these components explain the failure of sexual inuendo in the following ad.
In an advertising campaign for tires with the slogan: "Remember Your Rubber",
one spot features a father and son discussing the son's upcoming date. The father
tells the son: "When you're young and restless and live life in the fast lane, you
tend to overlook matters of protection. Son, I just want you to remember your rubber". The innuendo here may be considered too labored and too controversial - the
apparent condoning of a promiscuous lifestyle. Indeed, several hearers of the ad
understood it to be selling prophylactics rather than tires (San Diego Business Journal, February 26, 1990: 1).
Let me conclude by giving one more example of the 'failed' use of sexual innuendo as a persuasive technique, not in advertising, but as part of a school student's
nominating speech before the school assembly.
I know a man who is firm - he's firm in his pants, he's firm in his shirt, his
character is firm - but most of all his belief in you, the students of Bethel is firm.
Jeff Kuhlman is a man who takes his point and pounds it in. If necessary he'll
take an issue and nail it to the wall. He doesn't attack things in spurts - he drives
hard, pushing and pushing until finally - he succeeds.
Jeff is a man who will go to the very end - even the climax, for each and every
one of you.
D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59
57
So vote for Jeff for ASB vice president - he'll never come between you and the
best our school can be. (Bethel School Dist. No. 403 v. Fraser, 106 S. Ct. 3159,
3167 [1986]).
This is probably the most transparent, or rather blatant example of innuendo so
far, as was attested by the uproarious reception the speech received. As a result of
the speech, the Bethel School Board disciplined the student, Mathew Fraser, for
using obscene language, which prompted the student to bring a civil rights action.
Ultimately, the Supreme Court upheld the right of Bethel School Board to punish the
student for obscene language in school. The Court found that "the pervasive sexual
innuendo in Fraser's speech was plainly offensive to both teachers and students indeed to any mature person" (Bethel School Dist. No. 403 v. Fraser, 106 S.Ct.
3165). Clearly, the School District could not ignore the innuendo nor would the
Courts allow its denial.
15. Conclusion
In this paper, I have described those properties which allow us to identify an utterance as innuendo. I have stressed that this identification is concerned with the pragmatics of utterance interpretation rather than the cognitive mechanisms of information processing. As such, the properties which allow us to identify an utterance as
innuendo reside in the rules of use of the term. Those rules constitute a set of contextual particulars which allow hearers to ascribe to a speaker the intention to make
an innuendo.
In terms of venomous innuendo, the clearest clue on the societal level is that
the speaker is faced with a critical juncture. The most readily identifiable of these
junctures is in the political context where the conflictual nature of politics
requires that attacks be made on others. So, it is not surprising then that during
p a r b a c h a n or during political conventions, at contentious senate hearings or in
the political pages of the press, our antennae are at the ready for veiled accusations. And because of our interest in, and knowledge of these speech events, we
become the likely intended recipients of whatever hidden messages that are being
sent.
So, given our knowledge of the players, their interests and their enemies, and our
own role, our interpretive processes are primed for any breaks in the frame of the
'conventional' discourse that speakers are participating in. These breaks in the frame
may b e signaled by linguistic and/or paralinguistic clues or by the juxtaposition of
utterances which contravene the local conventions of the discourse. The ship's log is
not the place we expect to hear something that we take for granted, i.e. the captain's
sobriety, or in a biographical sketch of a political aide and a congressman that they
often stay at each other's houses and they are single. These signals, then, invite an
inference, and if this inference can be considered derogatory to another party, and at
the same time can be said to be intentionally so, then it can be said to be an innuendo
of the venomous kind.
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D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59
O f c o u r s e , the p r o c e s s is both t o p - d o w n and b o t t o m - u p . L i n g u i s t i c a n d / o r para l i n g u i s t i c c l u e s or the j u x t a p o s i t i o n o f a p p a r e n t l y i r r e l e v a n t u t t e r a n c e s m a y trigg e r the h e a r e r to c o n s t r u c t the l a r g e r c o n t e x t u a l p a r t i c u l a r o f critical j u n c t u r e . So
in the case o f the f i r s t - m a t e and the s h i p ' s log, w e do not a n t i c i p a t e any critical
j u n c t u r e , but the log entry c e r t a i n l y p r o m p t s us to e x p l o r e further. But for the m o s t
part, I w o u l d s u g g e s t that initiators o f i n n u e n d o e s can e x p e c t that g i v e n the c o n text o f their r e m a r k s , i n t e n d e d r e c i p i e n t s will a l r e a d y be p r i m e d for the p o s s i b i l i t y
o f i n n u e n d o . In such a situation, the t r a n s p a r e n c y o f the i n n u e n d o is m o r e a factor
o f the c o n t e x t than linguistic form, thus r e d u c i n g the s i g n a l i n g l o a d o f l i n g u i s t i c
c l u e s and the n e e d to resort to the kind o f l i n g u i s t i c l e g e r d e m a i n used b y the firstmate.
By e x a m i n i n g the kinds o f properties which allow speakers to identify an utterance as innuendo, it is h o p e d that the present study will help illuminate the study o f
other types o f non-overt p r a g m a t i c acts such as hints, allusions, insinuations, digs,
snide remarks, and c o d e - w o r d s . A n d through a better understanding o f h o w nonovert c o m m u n i c a t i o n operates and the p u r p o s e s to which it is put, we can better
appreciate the kinds o f linguistic resources interactants e m p l o y to influence others
and to further their o w n c o n c e a l e d goals.
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