Noncompositional

Over at Language Log, Geoff Pullum has posted on the ongoing story of Gillian Gibons, a schoolteacher teaching in Khartoum, Sudan. She has been charged with blasphemy for naming (actually, for accepting the class’ suggestion for naming) a teddy bear “Muhammad,” apparently after one of the most popular boys in the class.

I don’t want to get into the details of this particular case, but I do want to comment on something in Geoff’s final paragraph, which begins:

Here on the Linguistic Crimes desk we try to highlight the lighter side of language offenses: the zany character of victimless criminality that amount to no more than uttering strings of letters of syllables, the mad asterisking of words too awful to print, the giggleworthy character of loony attempts to suppress free speech.

Now I am sure Geoff has thought about the philosophy of language, and in particular the philosophy of what language “means,” far more than I could have if I had started when I was born and not stopped until last night, but there is something interesting in this particular statement. That is, on the one hand, we have the fact that “uttering of strings of letters and syllables” cannot reasonably constitute victim-ful criminality (being inherently meaningless, one presumes). On the other hand, we have the importance of the freedom of speech, which one presumes is an important thing to do because sometimes speech is meaningful or somehow experienced as meaningful.

But like I said, I’m no philosopher.