Wordwatch: referencing

In the decade 2010-20 the traditional phrase “to refer to” has been almost entirely supplanted by a new formula: “referencing.” As in: “”Charlotte, Ben and I are beyond proud to have had such a big character in our lives,” she said, referencing the pair’s adult children” – online news report, 15 March 2020.

The change follows a pattern that is common these days. It is, to begin with, quite unnecessary: it isn’t quicker to say or easier to understand. It is just more apparently “technical” than “referring to”. The new phrase is lifted from the academic jargon of Semiotics, or the study of signs, and is no improvement on the older form but is steadily replacing it nonetheless. The only explanation can be that the new phrasing sounds more learned, but in everyday prose, like this news report, it’s pompous and stilted. Why on earth should one want to sound learned in everyday speech?

The fact is of course, that – as I often point out – most people are not influenced by a wish to sound more sophisticated. They simply copy, without thinking, what they hear other people doing.  Because others do it, they think it’s “cool”. This is how language changes.

When we refer to something or someone, we denote it or them as the object of our reference. Our reference signified its object, which is therefore the “signified”. A big step was taken when ideas about the “signifier” and the “signified” moved from the realm of philosophy as it had been studied from the days of St Augustine of Hippo in the early fifth century AD to the late nineteenth, at the hands of a Swiss philosopher, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913).

Saussure’s ideas about semiotics were taken up in a big way after the Second World War by the French philosophers of the Structuralist school, which became very fashionable despite few people being able to understand it. (People love to give the impression that they understand the incomprehensible. A great deal of modern art is founded on that principle.)

Umberto Eco was a famous Semiotician, and his whose novel The Name of the Rose has become a popular classic, enjoyed by many people who have perhaps never heard of Semiotics or Structuralism. It is really a detective story, and one could argue that any whodunnit is an exercise in semiotics, since it is usually a sequence of derivations from clues, or signifiers, and the assembly of a coresponding set of things signified leading to a final all-embracing thing signified.

But I am contradicted by one of the most prominent figures of the movement, Jacques Derrida, who asserted (and I quote from Wikipedia, to which I am indebted here) that “signifier and signified are not fixed.” He coined the term “différance” relating to “the endless deferral of meaning”, and to the absence of a “transcendent signified.” I hope you can make more of that than I can.

One of the most famous formulations of Structuralism was the notion that there is no such thing as objective, verifiable truth. All meaning is deferred, and facts are merely constructs, varying according to who is uttering them, or “referencing” them. Yes, I’m afraid that all of this, and much more of the same, is implied when we use the term “referencing”, in place of “referring to”. It might make you pause and think before you speak, mightn’t it?