more on "Monday"

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Mon Jul 23 14:22:40 UTC 2012


On Jul 23, 2012, at 10:08 AM, Amy West wrote:

> Ben,
>
> I'm glad you picked up on this news story, because it had me scratching
> my head when I read about it in the T&G: I have never heard the term in
> the wild, but I lead a pretty sheltered life. A T & G columnist had a
> column about it today -- dunno if it will be helpful: it starts off with
> a source/quote I haven't seen come by before.
>
> http://www.telegram.com/article/20120723/COLUMN44/107239890
>
> (There's a philosophical question here: if someone calls you a name and
> you *don't know* that it's derogatory, are you still insulted? Or the
> inverse: if you use a term ignorantly and *don't know* that it's
> insulting, are you guilty of "hate speech"?)
>
An interesting theoretical issue, and one that came up in the early days of speech act theory.  J. L. Austin, in his lectures* that turned into _How to do things with words_, discussed the issue of whether "insult" is, in his terminology, an illocutionary verb (one that is characterized by speaker's intentions, like "promise") or a perlocutionary one (characterized by its effect on the hearer, like "alert").  He put it in both categories, like "tempt" and "warn" ("I warned you, but you didn't listen" vs. "I tried to warn you, but you didn't listen").  So the cop could have been said to insult Crawford on the illocutionary sense or he could have been said to have tried but failed to insult him on the perlocutionary sense, if Crawford (like most of the rest of us before this thread) had no idea what a Monday was.

LH

*Luckily, Morgenbesser wasn't attending these lectures, shouting out a rich Yiddish "Yeah, yeah" at every opportunity.

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