Bell Innuendo

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: bell@nucba.ac.jp 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-
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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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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
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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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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
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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'
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)
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.
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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
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
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:
52
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-
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,
54
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).
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.
B~
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).
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
56
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.
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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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.
References
Anderson, Edward, 1990. Literary and rhetorical influences of the black American folk tradition. (ERIC Document ED328920). Austin, J.L., 1962. How to do things with words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bach, Kent and Robert Hamish, 1979. Linguistic communication and speech acts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Blakemore, Diane, 1992. Understanding utterances. Oxford: Blackwell. Brenneis, Donald, 1980. Straight talk and sweet talk: Political discourse in a community of equals. Working Papers in Sociolinguistics, No. 71. Southwest Educational Development Lab: Austin, TX (ERIC Document ED197589). Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, Herbert H., 1979. Responding to indirect speech acts. In: Steven Davis, ed., 1991, Pragmatics, 199-230. New York: Oxford University Press. Coulter, Jeff, 1989. Mind in action. Cambridge: Polity Press. Crew, Louie. 1987. Rhetorical beginnings: Professional and amateur. College Composition and Communication 38 (October): 346-357. Evans, N., 1992, 'Wanjh! Bonj! Nja!': Sequential organization and social deixis in Mayali interjections. Journal of Pragmatics 18: 225-244. Farrell, Thomas J., 1979. The female and male modes of rhetoric. College English 40(8): 909-921. Fischer, David Hackett, 1970. Historians' fallacies. New York: Harper & Row. Fremlin, Robert, 1991. Speak no evil. The Recorder, October 15: 8. Garner, Thurmon, 1983. Cooperative communication strategies: Observations in a black community. Journal of Black Studies 14(2): 233-250. Goffman, Erving, 1981. Forms of talk. Philadelphia, PA: University of Philadelphia Press. Grice, H.P., 1975. Logic and conversation. In: Steven Davis, ed., 1991, Pragmatics, 305-315. New York: Oxford University Press. Grice, H.P., 1981. Presupposition and conversational implicature. In: P. Cole, ed., Radical pragmatics, 183-198. New York: Academic Press.
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Helms, Alan, 1985. 'Hints ... faint clews and indirections': Whitman's homosexual disguises. In: Joann P. Krieg, ed., Walt Whitman here and now. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Holdcroft, David, 1978. Words and deeds: Problems in the theory of speech acts. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hollander, John, 1982. The figure of echo: A mode of allusion in Milton and after. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kassin, Saul, Lorri N. Williams and Courtney L. Saunders, 1990. Dirty tricks of cross-examination. Law and Human Behavior 14(4): 373-384. Lankton, Stephen and Jeffrey K. Zeig, eds., 1989. Extrapolations: Demonstrations of Eriksonian therapy. Eriksonian Monographs, No. 6. New York: Brunner and Mazel. Mao, LuMing, 1995. Review of Pragmatics: An introduction by Jacob L. Mey. Journal of Pragmatics 23 : 577~o00. Mey, Jacob L., 1993. Pragmatics: An introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Obeng, Samuel Gyasi, 1994. Verbal indirection in Akan informal discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 21: 37-65. Phelps, Timothy and Helen Winternitz, 1992. Capitol games. New York: Hyperion. Sabato, Larry, 1991. Feeding frenzy. New York: The Free Press. Searle, John R., 1965. What is a speech act? In: Steven Davis, ed., 1991, Pragmatics, 254-264. New York: Oxford University Press. Searle, John R., 1969. Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, John R., 1975. Indirect speech acts. In: Steven Davis, ed., 1991, Pragmatics, 265-277. New York: Oxford University Press. Searle, John R., 1979. Expression and meaning: Studies in the theory of speech acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smolla, Rodney A., 1986. Suing the press. New York: Oxford University Press. Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson, 1986. Relevance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Strawson, P.F., 1964. Intention and convention in speech acts. In: Steven Davis, ed., 1991, Pragmatics, 290-302. New York: Oxford University Press. Tsohatzidis, Savas L., 1989. Two consequences of hinting. Philosophy and Rhetoric 22(4): 288-293. Underwood, R.H. and W.H. Fortune, 1988. Trial ethics. Boston, MA: Little Brown. Walle, Alf H., 1976. Getting picked up without being put down: Jokes and the bar rush, Journal of the Folklore Institute 13: 201-217. Wegner, Daniel M., R. Wenzlaff, R.M. Kerker and A.E. Beattie, 1981. Incrimination through innuendo: Can media questions become public answers? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 40: 822-832. Wegner, Daniel M., 1984. Innuendo and damage to reputations. Advances in Consumer Research 11: 694-696. Wierzbicka, Anna, 1987. English speech act verbs: A semantic dictionary. Sydney: Academic Press.

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Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59

Received January 1995; revised version January 1996

D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59

D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59

2. Innuendo and speech acts

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D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59

D.M. Bell /Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59

D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59

D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59

D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59

D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59

6. Innuendo is a type of conversational implicature

D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59

7. There are no formal linguistic requirements for innuendo

D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59

8. An innuendo is a non-overt negative ascription

D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59

9. Innuendo is an intentional pragmatic act

10. Innuendoes may vary in their degree of transparency and opacity

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D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59

11. The target of an innuendo is rarely the addressee

D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59

12. Initiators, conveyors, targets, recipients, and censors

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13. The risks of explication and the benefits of implication

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D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59

14. Sexual innuendo

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D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59

D.M. Bell / Journal of Pragmatics 27 (1997) 35-59

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