Matthew Yglesias is riding one of his favorite hobby horses the “use-mention distinction.” (See here for more on this concept.)
He quotes a Maggie Gallagher column (Usually that byline is enough to make me move along; how she got syndicated is beyond me. But I digress.):
What some dismiss as protecting “merely” the word marriage is actually 90 percent of the loaf. If a married couple no longer consists of a husband and wife, we lose the shared meaning of the word; we lose the ability to speak the idea in public and be understood. Such ideas are what culture is made of. Marriage is a word, yes, but so are property, freedom, democracy, morality, and love. The Ten Commandments are made of words. The opponents of marriage understand what many of its friends do not: Capturing the word is the key to deconstructing the institution.
Says Matthew,
No, no, and no. Marriage is not a word, “marriage” is a word. Similarly, “Plato” has five letters but no legs while Plato had no letters but two legs. Similarly with property, freedom, democracy, morality, and love, none of which are words. Rather, “property,” “freedom,” “democracy,” “morality,” and “love” are all words. This stuff is important, people, important.
I disagree with Gallagher that allowing gays to marry would harm heterosexual marriage. Indeed, it strikes me as silly.
But her point about words conveying shared meanings seems rather obvious. Right now, “married” brings the image of a husband (who is a man) and a wife (who is a woman) who have taken a vow to love, honor, etc. until death (or irreconcilable differences?) do them part. That meaning would be altered if “married” could mean two guys, two gals, or one of each. The cultural significance of “marriage” would indeed be altered. For those who are religious (I’m not one of them), much of the spiritual connotation would be altered as well.
If, for example, we call George Harrison a “hall of fame solo artist,” then we cheapen that phrase for all time, so that applying it to, say, Elvis Presley or Chuck Berry has less meaning. So, in a sense, the words we use to represent things matter.
Now, if Matthew simply means that Gallagher should have used single quotes (or alternatively italics) around the terms she was mentioning, then I’d say it’s a relatively minor, and pedantic, argument, since it’s pretty clear from the context that she’s referring to the words and their relationship to the ideas they connote. Indeed, I’d argue that putting quotation marks, around “merely” to emphasize it was at least as aggregious. But I’m not sure what style manual her syndicate ascribes to. These things are mere grammatical conventions; they don’t in and of themselves have meaning.
