language, meanng, modernity, doowop

7/30/2019 Language, Meanng, Modernity, Doowop

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Language, meaning, modernity, and doowop*

DAVID SAMUELS

Hana mana ganda, hana mana ganda, we

translate for you Hana means what manameans, and ganda means that, too.

What Makes the Red Man Red? Peter

Pan (Disney 1954)

. . . [T]here is a philosophy of language im-

plicit in the very word nonsense . . .

Jean-Jacques Lecercle

Introduction: The Cellos

In March 1957, Apollo Records in New York released a single by a doo-

wop quintet called the Cellos. The song, Rang Tang Ding Dong (I Am

the Japanese Sandman), was written by Alvin Williams, the bass singer

of the group, which was composed of students at Charles Evans Hughes

High School on West 18th Street in Manhattan. The single was a minor

hit for the group, rising as high as number 62 on the Billboardpop charts.

Since then, the reception and circulation of Rang Tang Ding Dong

have run along two parallel and contradictory tracks, invoking a twinned

memorableness and dismissability of the song. On the one hand, the rec-

ord has proven distinctly memorable. It has been anthologized in a num-

ber of important collections of early rock and roll, and its title was quoted

by Frank Zappa at the end ofJoes Garage (1979). On the other hand, the

record is remembered today as a wild novelty. Greil Marcus (1999),

writing for Salon.com, called it one of the most ridiculous records ever

made. Given this judgment of history, it may be doubly ridiculous for meto try to extract any seriousness from the whole business. So let me try to

enunciate a bit what the stakes are in making the attempt.

What does doowop say about language and language ideologies? In the

distinction between language and non-language, we find resonances of

Semiotica 1491/4 (2004), 297323 00371998/04/01490297

6 Walter de Gruyter


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one key area of European rationalist ideology. Where did this modern

notion of language come from? Can we trace its history? This article is

a first attempt at doing so. Important work in language ideology (Schief-

felin, Woolard, and Kroskrity 1998; Kroskrity 2000) has established the

intimate relationship between power, ideology, and the usage of or criti-

cal stance toward varieties of language. In what follows, I want to take

a step back from that valuable discussion to explore the question of how

a notion of language was carved from the flow of semiotic practices in

modernizing Europe.

Part of the answer to these questions lies in the reception that doo-

wop received as it circulated in contemporary cultural contexts during the

mid- to late-twentieth century. By situating my discussion at the nexus

of these contradictory paths the memorability of dismissible nonsenseand novelty I hope to use this particular song, and the marginalized

genre of which it is a token, to uncover and address modernitys natural-

ization of a relationship between language, semantics, and sense.1

Like the distinction between sonorousness and noise that lies at the

heart of culturally naturalized ideologies of music, I claim that a distinc-

tion between sense and nonsense lies at the heart of modernitys sense

of what language is.2 One part of my discussion will look at how, in the

context of modernity, some utterances become framed as dismissible nov-

elties, jokes, and nonsense. Another part will concern how nonsense

oers a possible critical perspective on modern ideologies of the desire for

a semantic transparency of language.

What makes Rang Tang Ding Dong such a memorable 2 minute 45

second joy ride? The song begins rather typically in one of the traditions

of doowop: the use of vocables in order to represent the incomprehensible

languages of Others.3 Doubtless this linguistic practice is itself worthy of

further investigation. But I want to attend to a moment of linguistic con-

sciousness about the division of labor between language and nonsense

syllables that appears with about a minute left in the song. At around the

1:50 mark of the song, a member of the Cellos stages one of the more

famous breakdowns in the history of rock and roll. Frustrated with his

role in the performance, this background singer refuses to go on, com-

plaining about the quality of what he gets to sing versus what the others

get to sing. His objection is:

Man, all you guys get to say the big things. All I get to say is . . .

. . . and then the song resumes, the rang tang, ding dong, ranky sank

chorus virtuosically motoring to the final fade.

What is this complaint about everybody else getting to say the big

things? Indeed, what are the big things? It doesnt require too large a

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leap of faith to conclude that, for the rebellious singer, the big things are

words the lexical items that carry semantic and referential meaning.

Rang Tang Ding Dong pushes that notion to the edge, if not over it,

insofar as the words that constitute the big things here consist of such

lines as, I wear a pin-striped jacket made of chunky foo-yang. In con-

trast, the little things are the semantically and referentially empty non-

sense vocables rang tang ding dong that are among the most promi-

nent vocal and stylistic aspects of the song, and of doowop singing more

generally.

The moment of interruption in Rang Tang Ding Dong encapsulates a

political and aesthetic consciousness about the relationship between doo-

wops expressive practices and the constitution of language and com-

munication. It raises the naturalization of semantic meaning as themark of legitimacy in linguistic practice as a topic for critical reflection

and metadiscursive performance.

Doowop disrespects a master trope of modernity: that language is a

tool for clear and transparent communication. Or perhaps it is safer to

say the modern version of the trope; for it undoubtedly has a lengthy his-

tory in the Western intellectual tradition. One consequence of this trope

is that modernitys critical focus on language is most salient at the level

of code, and what the code purports to represent a means by which

symbols can stand for things in the world. And the contact between codes

was an increasingly prominent feature of European consciousness of lan-

guage beginning in the seventeenth century. At that code-level, the stark,

zero-sum, evolve-or-die picture presented by Derrida in Monolingualism

of the Other (1998) is undeniably prominent in thinking about the rela-

tionship between languages, and is dicult to deny. Yet, it is challenged

by various theories of mediation in practice: diglossia, code-switching,

creolization, hybridity.

At another remove, however, Derridas compelling model assumes that

languages are in toto lexico-sytactic codes. When we think about the

problem of modernity and language, however, we ought also to think

about how that problem is constituted not only in practices of using

marginalized codes, but in practices that conflict with dominant ideolo-

gies of what language and code are in the first place, as well. I contend

that marginalized communities undercut ideologies of language even

as those dominant languages are being used (willingly or unwillingly) in

those communities (Samuels 2001; Nevins 2002). This undercutting takesplace in performance of the tension between meaning and nonsense that

modernity sets up. Through virtuosic practices of incomprehensibility

vocables, puns, mispronunciations marginalized social and linguistic

groups demonstrate the price at which modernitys notions of coherence

Language, meaning, modernity, and doowop 299


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and meaning have been purchased. That is, even as standard or national

languages have intensified and tightened their grips on the worlds margi-

nalized peoples, those people find ways to back-talk the processes of lin-

guistic modernity (Stewart 1990).4

Language and modernity

The problem of language and modernity resonates powerfully with the

unprecedented language contact of early European colonization and glob-

alization. Eurocentric critical perspectives on sense and nonsense emerged

out of interpersonal and interlinguistic problems of communication in

The Age of Exploration. Indeed, the first documented instances of thewords sense and nonsense being attached to questions of linguistic

signification occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, respec-

tively. At that time, various heterogeneous linguistic practices began to

come under new forms of scrutiny, policy, and policing.5 This scrutiny

connects the problem of language and modernity to the simultaneously

developing problems of nation and of identity, and to the way in which

problems of nation were expressed through grappling with the problem of

homogeneity and heterogeneity. In his work on the development of sta-

tistics, Ian Hacking frames this shift as in some sense concerned with

what we may call the erosion of determinism (Hacking 1991: 185; em-

phasis in original). Modernizing European states used statistics to pro-

duce knowable, quantifiable, and diagnostic norms of cultural and social

existence in order to contend with the possibility that real chance existsand is part of the underlying structure of the world (1991: 185). Hack-

ing traces a growing acknowledgement of indeterminacy throughout the

nineteenth century and sees in the development of statistics a means for

the taming of chance (Hacking 1991: 194). This entwinement of in-

determinacy and rationalization finds interesting resonance in the realm

of language and semiotics; two of the key figures in the development of

modern theories of language and symbol were immersed in the world of

statistical probability: Benjamin Lee Whorf in the world of actuarial

tables at the Hartford Fire Insurance Company (Lavery 2000) and

Charles Sanders Peirce in the intellectual world of mathematical proba-

bility theory (Menand 2001: 151200).6 What are the chances of that?

Sense in language and literature

The emergent conjoining of the oppositional distinctions between sense

and nonsense, determinacy and indeterminacy, science and sensuousness

300 D. Samuels


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can be read through a number of resonances in the history of modern

European literature and criticism. Again, while these oppositions are

hardly unique to this period, there are particularities to the scope of the

issues of indeterminacy and nonsense beginning around the turn of the

seventeenth century that mirror, in many ways, those surrounding the rise

of statistics and the problem of cultural unity in the development of mod-

ern nationalism discussed above. I will trace these through a discussion of

philology and dictionary-making and through an exploration of shifting

ideologies around the notion of punning.

Concerns over the potential consistent meanings of national commu-

nities had practical as well as theoretical consequences for the concept of

languages. In France, the 1637 establishment of the Academie Francaise

was an important institutional development in making French, and spe-cifically the northern, langue doil dialect of French, a consistent and ra-

tional national standard.7 By the late eighteenth century, both revolu-

tionaries and counter-revolutionaries in France accepted the natural logic

of a national language nationalism and rationalism drawing each

others maps. The French Revolution was hardly about the strength of

dialects over standard languages, and certainly not about the democratic

preservation of minority languages as Bertrand Bareres famous 1794

quote about fanaticism speaking Basque makes clear. Indeed, Bareres

insistence that The language of a free people must be one and the same

for all resonates with Habermass ideal speech situation, in which con-

sensus is arrived at through interlocutors consistent use of terms to mean

the same things (Habermas 1990: 87). In the intellectual formation of na-

tional standard languages in modernizing Europe, a number of questions

about clarity, sense, and nonsense surfaced as markers of social and polit-

ical dierence. In revolutionary France, A fundamental misunderstand-

ing of the meaning of certain words (e.g. egalite, volonte), the royalists

believed, had shaped the revolutionaries thought processes and distorted

their perception of things (De Landa 1997: 231).8

In England, lexicography and philology preceded statistics as a parallel

form of anxious compilation of social data beginning in the seventeenth

century. Dictionary-making, from Robert Cawdreys Table Alphabeticall

(1604) or Thomas Blounts Glossographia (1656), through Samuel John-

sons Dictionary of the English Language (1755),9 to the full flower of

the project resulting in the Oxford English Dictionary in the mid- to late-

1800s, traces an increasing rationalization of meaning as semanticmeaning in British intellectual thought a concern no doubt heightened

by the linguistic aspects of the 1707 union of England and Scotland and

the 1801 Act of Union with Ireland, both of which intensified issues of

language and dialect. It was not simply the Act of Union, however, but a



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confluence of factors that resulted in this sense of language. The Act of

Union with Wales had been in force since 1536, but the problem of lin-

guistic unification for Wales the confluence of British with English

didnt become an issue until the late eighteenth or early nineteenth

century (Tyson 1998).

In any event, Johnson wrote in the Preface to his 1755 dictionary:

When I took the first survey of my undertaking, I found our speech copious

without order, and energetick without rules: wherever I turned my view, there was

perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated; choice was to be

made out of boundless variety, without any established principle of selection;

adulterations were to be detected, without a settled test of purity, and modes of

expression to be rejected or received, without the surages of any writers of clas-sical reputation or acknowledged authority. (Johnson 1967[1755]: 1)

If rationalists considered language to be some form of social-

contractual arrangement between speakers, then dictionaries, grammars,

and pronunciation guides put that contract in writing.10 The emerging

science of lexicography banished folk-etymologizing from the field. As

Culler (1988) has observed, only true histories of words would matter.

The thought, for instance, that there might be any but a coincidental ho-

monymic relationship between the words rage and outrage would mark

ones lack of linguistic knowledge.11 As the sense of linguistic meaning

became increasingly rational and less sensual, sound evaporated as lan-

guage was increasingly re-produced in philosophy as a rational mental

construct. Locke oered a proto-Saussurean model of language in the

Essay on Human Understanding (1690), in which he argued that catego-

rization is not in the world, but in the mind an arrangement of partic-

ular instances agreed upon by human beings:

[I]deas are general when they are set up as the representatives of many particular

things: but universality belongs not to things themselves, which are all of them

particular in their existence . . . When therefore we quit particulars, the generals

that rest are only creatures of our own making; their general nature being nothing

but the capacity they are put into, by the understanding, of signifying or repre-

senting many particulars. ( Locke III, iii, 11)

Lockes sense of the arbitrariness of signs, however, is more universalistthat relativist. For whatever the names of concepts, they are derived from

the empirical impress of the world onto the human mind. Any true lan-

guage would be ultimately commensurable with and translatable into any

other, because at root all languages came into existence for the same rea-

302 D. Samuels


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son: to name the world in ways that could be communicated socially.

Even abstract concepts are rooted in descriptors of the material world.

It may also lead us a little towards the original of all our notions and knowledge,

if we remark how great a dependence our words have on common sensible ideas;

and how those which are made use of to stand for actions and notions quite re-

moved from sense, have their rise from thence, and from obvious sensible ideas

are transferred to more abstruse significations, and made to stand for ideas that

come not under the cognizance of our senses; v.g. to imagine, apprehend, com-

prehend, adhere, conceive, instil, disgust, disturbance, tranquillity, &c., are all

words taken from the operations of sensible things, and applied to certain modes

of thinking . . . and I doubt not but, if we could trace them to their sources, we

should find, in all languages, the names which stand for things that fall not under

our senses to have had their first rise from sensible ideas. (Locke III, i, 5)

Thus Locke argues that even the most abstract concepts are ultimately

derived from things on the ground, the naming of material reality. This

sense of language as naming has a long but uneven history in Western

philosophy. While the concept of the arbitrariness of the sign can be traced

to Platos Cratylus; it is Hermongenes and not Socrates who voices the

opinion that there is no principle of correctness in names other than

convention and agreement. Socrates own analysis is much more deeply

rooted in historicized relations of metaphorical extension and sonic icon-

icity, just those kinds of things that modern philology discarded as folk

etymologizing or false linguistic consciousness. In historical linguistics,

however which of course means the social history of language in use sound iconicity and metaphorical extension have been crucial. For ex-

ample, Uli Linke has analyzed the metaphorical extensions out of Proto-

Indo-European that resulted in the consanguineal and anal kinship

terms in the Indo-European languages (Linke 1985). In other words, the

fate of sound iconicity in the history of language and language ideology is

important to consider.

The fate of the pun

One battleground between the rationalizing and uniformizing fervor of

standardization and practices of heterogeity can be seen in a history of

the pun. Here we can witness the uneven and non-isomorphic ways inwhich the rationalizing developments of modernity took hold of lan-

guage, both in order to stabilize and normativize semantic meaning, and

to promote semantic meaning as the keystone of what language is for. It

may be less the practice of punning itself and more the shifting attitude



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toward punning and wordplay that marks the emergence of a sense of

language for modernity.

As a lexical item in English, pun is itself an addition of modernity.

Paull F. Baum, in his groundbreaking work on Chaucers puns (1956),

notes that the first recorded instance of the word pun occurred in 1643

(Baum 1956: 226); the edition of the Oxford English Dictionary that I

consulted placed the words first appearance even later, in 1662 (in Act I

scene i of John Drydens first play, The Wild Gallant). At that time, it was

apparently already used with somewhat disparaging overtones:

A bare Clinch will serve the turn; a Carwichet, a Quarterquibble, or a Punn.

The appearance of a term to describe the practice may indicate itsavailability as a topic for metapragmatic and ideological reflection and

comment. But punning wordplay surely pre-existed the word pun, as

scholarship on Chaucer and other Medieval literary work attests. Sheila

Delany has argued that the Late Medieval period in England and the

Continent was already distinguished by a growing mistrust of figurative

language, a shift away from analogical thought the threads of which are

traceable in developments in science, political theory, and poetry (Delany

1990). A number of late medieval authors were bent on pointing out the

fictiveness of metaphor and analogy, and to draw a sharp distinction be-

tween figures of speech and fact (Justman 1980: 199). Stewart Justman

in fact argues that such a distinction is the engine that powers the entire

Canterbury Tales a recurring ironic literalism that disruptively or-

ganizes the analogical meanings of Chaucers stories. Justman attributesthis organizing principal, in part, to a Chaucerian commentary on the

anti-authoritarian literalism of the emerging merchant class in fourteenth-

century England an emergence marked, in Chaucers telling, by an

inability to recognize the moral authority of analogical signs. One fre-

quently explored instance of this misrecognition is the conflation of sexual

and economic intercourse in the puns on cosyn and cosynage (relationship

and deception) and on taillynge (both account and the modern slang

word for pudendum [Silverman 1953: 330]) in the Shipmans Tale (Abra-

ham 1977; Justman 1980; Silverman 1953).12 Appealing to the Communist

Manifesto, Justman relates the shifting attitude toward figurative analogy

to Marx and Engelss contention that

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand . . . has pitilessly torn asunderthe motley feudal ties that bound man to his natural superiors . . . The bour-

geoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the

family relation to a mere money relation . . . (Marx and Engels; cited in Justman

1980: 201)13

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While this fourteenth-century attack by literalism on figuration and

analogy, in Justmans view, perhaps marks the early emergence of a

nascent bourgeoisie in England, Chaucer clearly depended on figurative

language and speech play to make the critical shift manifest. Nor is the

fate of punning uniform, unidirectional, or isomorphically linked to eco-

nomic shifts. Absent the institutions of standardization that arose be-

ginning in the seventeenth century, writers were potentially more open to

transformative and productive gaps in linguistic form and structure. As

Baum noted:

After the medieval rhetoricians in their confused and mechanical way had played

with it, the Renaissance rhetoricians overworked it and the Elizabethans reveled

in all of its manifestations. (Baum 1956: 226)

Thus the pleasures of punning rose and fell over the two centuries of

developing class structure in Early Modern England.

That Shakespeare did not have access to what we would today consider

a dictionary is jarring, perhaps. But when Shakespeare died in 1616,

Blounts Glossographia was still forty years o, and Johnsons Dictionary

a century and a half away. When he used a word, Shakespeare had no

centralized, authoritative resource to tell him if he was spelling the word

correctly, using it to indicate its accepted meaning, or indicating a pro-

nunciation that was in keeping with accepted practice. For Shakespeare,

the success of an utterance was predicated on its phatic potential, rather

than any exclusive appeal to a referential sense based on the kinds ofauthoritative metadiscursive compilations of terms that we today take

for granted. As James Weiner has written of the Foi in Papua New

Guinea, if no dictionary exists, then it is only by the appropriateness

of ones utterance that the fitness of a word is judged . . . a matter as

much of sensual and aesthetic as of lexical fitness (1991: 199). Harris

(1996), Urban (1996), and Jacobson (2002) all note the cultural and his-

torical specificity of dictionaries as powerful metalinguistic authorities,

and allude to the potential experiential distinctions of practicing lexicog-

raphy or philology in communities where the dictionary is not the ulti-

mate source of authoritative statements about the meaning of verbal

signs.14

The published dictionary delivers what it promises: the printed book is itself aquasi-permanent repository of invariant (sc. written) forms. In an oral culture no

parallel enterprise would be possible. And if it were, consulting the oral lexicog-

rapher would be a quite dierent communicational undertaking from consulting

the dictionary. ( Harris 1996: 103)



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The shift from a seventeenth-century Elizabethan concept of punnings

place in language to a more modern and rational concept of such has

been commented on by a number of literary scholars. In his classic trea-

tise on poetic ambiguity, William Empson wrote of the shifting fortunes

of punning as ideologies of proper language shifted in England. Writing

of Marvells use of puns, Empson remarked that their distinguishing char-

acteristic is that Marvell manages to feel Elizabethan about them (Emp-

son 1930: 106). But punning, Empson continued, became harder as the

language was tidied up (Empson 1930: 106). By tidied up, he alludes to

the changing status of punning during the emergence of standardization

and normativization beginning in the seventeenth century:

The Elizabethans were quite prepared, for instance, to make a pun by a mispro-nunciation, would treat puns as mere casual bricks, requiring no great refinement,

of which any number could easily be collected for a flirtation or indignant ha-

rangue. By the time English had become anxious to be correct the great thing

about a pun was that it was not a Bad Pun, that it satisfied the Unities and what

not; it could stand alone and would expect admiration, and was a much more

elegant aair. (Empson 1930: 106)

The anxiety about correctness of which Empson writes is reflected in the

growing concern with rationalized treatments of language that attempted

to contain the heterogeneity of linguistic practice. As English was codi-

fied, the potentialities of phonetic iconicities became thought of, in some

circles, as transgressive. This is not to say that modernity made the sen-

suousness of poetic language unacceptable. It was a question of decorum.By the time of the Augustan poets in the early eighteenth century, poets

were berating punsters for displaying their bad taste in public:

Dryden . . . jibbed at a pun by Horace: Certain it is, he has no fine palate who

can feed so heartily on garbage. John Dennis asserted that every Equivocal is

but ambiguous Falsehood, and, against the defence that puns are diverting, re-

sponded by asking whether those who fart in company might use the same foolish

argument to exonerate themselves. ( Redfern 1984: 51)

Daniel Defoe (16601731), author of Robinson Crusoe, and thus some-

one who may be thought of as having considered the problems of human

communication and language, proposed in 1697 that a 36-member Acad-

emy should monitor the stability of English. Defoe delighted in the factthat under the authority of such an Academy it would be as criminal

then to coin words as money (Nist 1966: 275). This Early Modern En-

glish analogy between proper linguistic and economic relations resonates

with a point that Saussure made more subtly in his idea of linguistic

306 D. Samuels


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valeur. The analogy also echoes Dantes belief, expressed in the Inferno,

that because social order depends on symbols . . . counterfeiting coins is a

worse crime than murder. It is more far-reaching (Justman 1980: 204).15

Concern with punning and the true meanings of words were not limited

to Britain. In France, Moliere wrote: Its all plays on words, pure aec-

tation, and this is in no way how Nature speaks (cited in Redfern 1984:

51).16

As standard linguistic forms and practices became stabilized through

the policing practices of modernity and as semantic meaning became

the measure of an utterance and its interpretation punning became in-

creasingly transgressive. The call of the phoneme, whose echoes tell of

wild realms beyond the code (Culler 1988: 3) could only be heeded with

increasing circumspection. Indeed Empson himself favored circumspec-tion. By foregrounding their semantic possibilities too starkly, he advised,

punsters threaten to use it as a showpiece to which poetry and relevance

may be sacrificed (Empson 1930: 103). That Empson regarded Shake-

speares puns as eeminate and wished that the Bard had been more

manly in his literary habits (Empson 1930: 110111) and that Maurice

Charney referred (approvingly, I should emphasize) to the quarter-rhymes

of Ogden Nash and Dorothy Parker as miscegenated (Charney 1978: 24)

gives some sense of the metaphorical ground of race and gender that I

tread when I say that the problem of language and modernity is bound to

the problems of nation, identity, homogeneity, and marginalization.

By the turn of the twentieth century, then, the sensuousness of lan-

guage was acceptable in controlled doses so long as it enhanced or at

least did not detract from meaning or, in Empsons term, relevance. As

Empson discussed in his exploration of ambiguity, Victorian poetics was

concerned with rescuing unified meaning from a potential sea of signifi-

cation, an anxious desire to fix the leakiness of languages and grammars

by calling in the most masterful of master plumbers.17 A dierent inter-

pretation was that of Owen Barfield, who argued that poetry was mod-

ernitys only access to more primitive and authentic ways of experiencing

the world. Drawing on Levy-Bruhls notion of participation mystique,

Barfield found in the sensuousness of poetry a means of accessing a dif-

ferent way of being in the world.

. . . one of the most ecient causes of pleasure is palpably sound; the

rhythm, the music, and the manner in which rhythm and music are wedded tosense. (Barfield 1973[1928]: 47)

But sound and sense here, while wedded, are not on equal terms. On

closer examination, it seems clear that sense is the dominant spouse in



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this marriage; rhythm and music are in the service of sense. Barfields

sense of the poetic was tied to his theory that everyday language is a col-

lection of dead metaphors. The creativity of the poet can revivify a more

sensuous experience of language by reinstating participation mystique

for modern listeners. But Barfield never quite pushed past the idea that

modern use in language was a sense-making process consisting of words

and meanings. In Barfields poetic diction, sound is wedded to sense, but

never in such a way as to actually interfere with it.18 Barfields theory of

language is deaf to doowop.

In the face of these emerging norms of linguistic practice, marginalized

groups have made much of the space where meaning and sound meet.

For example, in eighteenth-century England, the emerging class of com-

mercial Grub Street writers derided by Pope and Swift as hacks oftencalled on non-lexical rhythmic repetition, repeated words suggesting the

sounds of musical instruments, instrumental sounds suggesting words,

and the like. Their poems were excoriated by the sophisticates of the

day Pope referred to their works as Duncean literature, meaning lit-

erature for dunces. Lance Bertelsen (1992) has tellingly referred to the

vocable eects of the Grub Street hacks as the doowop eect of their

poetry.

Vocables

In the context of the rationalizing forces of modernizing Europe in

which utterances or parts of utterances that threatened clarity and trans-

parency were increasingly excised from language, in which language was

reduced to the semantic loads carried by lexically and syntactially decod-

able utterances nonsense had no place. Vocables had nowhere to go.

Jane Goodman (1998, 2000), for example, describes a number of ration-

alizations that the texts of New Berber Songs in Algeria have undergone

as they moved from the village to the international world music scene.

Among these has been the striking of vocables from the texts: non-

sense syllables were eliminated the singers considered such syllables

flu that wastes space and interferes with the real point .19 Powers

(1992) has theorized that in their transcriptions of Native American song

texts, early ethnomusicologists translated vocables into Anglicized poetic

exclamations such as O! and Lo!20

One theory about the ceremonial use of vocables in traditional or

pre-colonial contexts draws a connection between vocables and secret

languages (Briggs 1996; Powers 1986). In that context, vocables are as-

sociated with powerful discourse: meaningless to the human or non-

308 D. Samuels


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human beings who do not understand them, but allowing powerful per-

formers to communicate with the supernatural world. That is, someone

(or something) can understand it. The coding aspect of vocables is also

invoked in the theory that vocables in popular music are acting euphe-

mistically, standing in for more direct references to sexual intercourse.

This theory explains but a small proportion of doowop vocable practices.

Both these theories redeem vocables from nonsense by proposing alter-

nate contexts in which their semanticity would emerge. But unless one is

prepared to make extended arguments about survivals of traditional cer-

emonial forms, the first theory does not address the deliberate use of

nonsense in non-ceremonial contemporary popular forms. The second

idea has the virtue of posing a question about the politics of the relation-

ship between the marginalization of vocables and the fact that the poeticpractices of marginalized people often so prominently feature vocables.

For by the turn of the twentieth century, this standardizing, modern ide-

ology of language as the clear communication of ideas from one brain to

another had turned the common Proto-Indo-European etymologies of

baby, babble, and barbarian into a bad pun.

Doowop as bad literature

And so let me now turn to the Duncean literature of our day rock n

roll. In their almost studied banality, early rock n roll lyrics transgressed

the ideology of meaningful, communicative language. The problems of

the rationalist set toward language resound in the problem of the doowopsong text. Most complaints about rock n roll during the 1950s were

about the music the simple and repetitive syntax of the chord pro-

gressions, the primitiveness of the jungle beat of the drums. But lyrics,

too, came under scrutiny. Meredith Willson, the composer of the Broad-

way shows The Music Man and The Unsinkable Molly Brown, was quoted

in The Instrumentalist in 1958 as saying:

My complaint is that it just isnt music. Its utter garbage, and it should not be

confused in any way with anything related with music or verse. (Anonymous 1958:

92; emphasis added)

Similarly, Janice Hume Russell, a music teacher and parent, wrote in

the March 1958 issue of the Music Journal about her concerns for heryoung daughter, who might become overly influenced by what she was

watching on American Bandstand after school. Russell solved the poten-

tial problem by giving her daughter a copy of the soundtrack to Okla-

homa for Christmas. This gambit succeeded, as Russell wrote:



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For, as soon as she had really listened to the record once through, she decided the

tunes ofOklahoma had a lilt and melody she hadnt expected and, best of all, some

story value. (Russell 1958: 84; emphasis added)

Verse and story value here both appear to be about the self-

conscious cleverness of Broadway show lyrics, in distinction to the non-

sense and banality of rock n roll. Within the public sphere of popular

performers, as well, distinctions were made distinctions of mainstream

and margin, in both race and class, wrapped up in a commentary about

taste and sense in linguistic or lyrical material. Pat Boone, speaking of his

early hits covering Little Richard songs, has commented on his initial re-

luctance to record rock n roll songs because of their texts:

I didnt want to record songs like Tutti Frutti and other songs like that, that

dont make a lot of sense. (Montgomery and Page 1984)

And indeed, in watching kinescopes of Pat Boones rock n roll per-

formances from the 1950s, the most striking thing isnt necessarily the

stiness with which he delivers awop bobalubop alop bam boom. Rather, it

may be the desperation with which Boone holds onto the semanticity of I

got a gal named Sue, she knows just what to do, as if these meaningful

words were in fact the material of the song.21

During the 1950s, Steve Allen was famously aghast at rock n roll lyr-

ics. The host of the Tonight Show, he would derisively read the words of

songs like Be Bop A Lula on the air with a mock seriousness, as though

they were real poetry. In 1965, Tom Wolfe wrote of Phil Spector havingto bear with a similarly disdainful performance during his appearance as

a guest on the David Susskind show in New York:

And Susskind sits there on his show reading one of Spectors songs out loud no

music, just reading the words, from the Top 60 or whatever it is Fine Fine

Boy, to show how banal rock & roll is. The song just keeps repeating, Hes a fine

fine boy. So Spector starts drumming on the big coee-table there with the flat of

his hands in time to Susskinds voice and says, What youre missing is the beat.

Blam blam. ( Wolfe 1992[1965]: 63)

That the Steve Allens, Meredith Willsons, David Susskinds, William B.

Williamses, and Janice Hume Russells of the world thought it important

to critique, if not belittle, not only the musical but the lexical materials ofrock n roll tells us of rock n rolls particular kind of nonsense, which

disrupted and undermined the way in which poetic devices were supposed

to work that is, the way poetry was supposed to wed sound and sense

in order to enhance meaning.

310 D. Samuels


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This default theory of the role of poetry has been largely accepted in the

celebratory mainstream history of rock music as well. Generally, the his-

tory of rock states that lyrics were in a sense disposable until Bob Dylan

picked up an electric guitar and showed rock n roll songwriters how to

compose meaningful texts. Those who dismiss doowop often do so along

the lines that the texts are childish and primitive. Those who celebrate

doowop often do so by imagining a context virtuosity, sociability,

feeling that allows the illocutionary force of a doowop utterance to be

conflated with its meaning: The words dont matter anyway, its about

the voices. Both of these arguments play into the default history of rock

songwriting by reproducing the role of sensible lyrics in the development

of a political and poetic art form crediting the lexified poetry and po-

litical position of lyrics, but rejecting the unlexified poetry and politicalposition of doowop.22 Both also play into a sense of language that is

cognitive, in the head, divorced from performance in the voice.

Theorizing doowop

At the same time, I must admit that doowop vocables are rarely consid-

ered political statements. They are usually contextualized as iconic re-

placements for band instruments. One positivist theory about doowops

origins, held by many performers as well as critics and historians, holds

that vocal harmony grew out of economic lack a lack of instruments

on the urban street corners where the style developed. Johnny Keyes, amember of the Magnificents from Chicago, wrote the following:

Making music was very basic. The one who knew the words to the song was the

lead singer. The remaining three or four singers imitated the sounds that the horns

made in the background, in harmony. (Quoted in Pruter 1996: 2)

This take on doowop vocables as iconic stand-ins for horn sections ex-

plains some but not all of the vocal practices of doowop. To be sure, a

song like the Orioles Crying in the Chapel does stand as an archetype

of the default theory about vocal harmony. The lead singer (the amazing

Sonny Til) sings the song while the group with him lays down a comfort-

able bass/baritone ground for the melody to lie in, and the first tenor

weaves soft falsetto obbligato phrases around the still points of the ar-rangement. Unlike a number of other group-singing traditions, in which

the line of a text is shared among various members of the ensemble, the

lexical text of Crying in the Chapel is not distributed among the group

members. Sonny Til sings all the words while the other singers vocalize



16/28

on high-back /u/. There is one exception to this arrangement: In the sec-

ond bridge (known as a channel in the lexicon of the genre), the back-

ground voices sing the line youll search and youll search but youll

never find. Otherwise, there is no verbalization in the harmony that is,

no distinct indexing of the dierence between voices and fabricated in-

struments, such as the ability of voices to change the concentrations of

overtones in the formation of dierent vowel sounds (see Feld, Fox, Por-

cello, and Samuels 2004; Ladefoged 2000). Since their texted lines are

accompanied by a shift from first person to second person, one can say

that the background vocalists never take up any portion of Sonny Tils

first-person narrative.23 Crying in the Chapel then is, as Johnny Keyes

wrote, an example of a lead singer and The remaining three or four singers

imitat[ing] the sounds that the horns made in the background.But this theory that vocables are, in any simple way, replacing instru-

ments doesnt account for the range of practices in doowop vocalization

the flights of virtuosity in doowop, the seamless shifting between lexical

and nonlexical vocalizations, the almost baroque lengths to which ar-

rangements were sometimes taken in the service of semantically empty

vocable material. Doowop breaches the boundaries between meaningful

and meaningless sounds. The importance of vocables in the genre can

be witnessed in the titles of songs, which often forego words (and which

are, of course, heavily influenced by onomatopoeia): Sh-Boom, Buzz-

Buzz-Buzz, Mope-Itty-Mope, Shimmy, Shimmy, Ko-Ko-Bop, Rama

Lama Ding Dong, Ling, Ting, Tong, Chop Chop Boom, Ka-Ding

Dong, Rang Tang Ding Dong, Bim Bam Boom, Zoop, Wiggie Wag-

gie Woo, Ding Ding Dong, or Zoom Zoom Zoom not to mention

the countless songs about chapel bells ringing that give license to iconic

vocalizing. Clearly all this nonsense bears illocutionary force and is there-

by interpretable. But we should not confuse interpretability with meaning,

which is, in a straightforward lexico-semantic sense, absent. At some

point, we have to deal with the practice of meaninglessness. Vocables here

employ phonotactics to do battle at the boundaries of language in its

guise as a semantico-referential system. They eervesce and overflow their

rightful place as background style. In part, perhaps, through their associa-

tions with more primitive or iconic modes of communication, they over-

whelm the poetics of modernity with meaninglessness and perversity.

The genre abounds with examples. Groups like the Five Discs pushed

doowops vocable virtuosity to the hilt. Never Let You Go, for example,opens with an extended non-texted section, featuring the kind of soar-

ing falsetto that was often reserved for the ends of songs. The introduc-

tion features star turns by bass Charlie diBella and lead singer John Car-

bone. When the meaningful words do finally appear, they are blended

312 D. Samuels


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into the background, as the vocable display continues. In Rubber Bis-

cuit, the Chips push this even further, creating almost an entire song out

of vocables, interspersed with spoken breaks that are only marginally

more sensible (today I had a cool-water sandwich and a Sunday-go-to-

meeting bun). The Channels named for the middle break of a doowop

song were another group that pushed the semantic emptiness of vo-

cables distinctly into the foreground. On songs such as Stars in the Sky,

as the group intoned the lyrics of the song, lead singer Earl Lewis per-

formed virtuosic falsetto runs in a style and with a microphone balance

that interfered heavily with the decodability of the lexical text. And, in

Vito and Salutations version of Unchained Melody, a number of per-

formance practices interfere with the clarity of the declaimed text.24 First,

the group takes this famous ballad and performs it about two and a halftimes faster than the original (approximately 150 beats per minute). Sec-

ond, the lead singer, Vito Balsamo, performs the song in a falsetto high

enough to aect as does a coloratura soprano the relationship be-

tween the fundamental frequency of a note and the harmonic formants

that make the decoding of vowel qualities possible. Finally, the arrange-

ment of the song slips the bonds between lexical and non-lexical material,

using syllabic repetition for artistic and rhythmic eect:

Oh, my love, my darling, I hunger for your tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-touch, oooooo

Time goes by so slowly, and time can do so mu-mu-mu-mu-mu-mu-much, are you

What, exactly, is the status of language as a meaning-bearing system of

reference here? In versions of Tin Pan Alley standards, such as the Salu-

tations rendition of Unchained Melody, the Marcels version of Blue

Moon, or the Impacts version of Canadian Sunset, the lyrical texts

of these songs sometimes are cast in a role something like what Tom

McArthur (1998) calls Decorative English. In a sense, they become

slightly more meaningful vocables.

When we say things about early rock n roll such as the words dont

matter, I think we often gloss over just how horrifying a statement that is

for a modern, rationalist perspective on language and poetry. Doowop

makes a dierent claim on such poetic devices as alliteration, metrical

stress, assonance, and consonance. Sound is not meanings dutiful spouse,

but rather its jealous sibling. This danger of meaninglessness overpower-

ing meaningfulness is, I think, what Steve Allen and Meredith Willsonand countless others were responding to in these songs. Vocables threat-

ened to overrun meaning with noise.

One way of recontaining the transgressiveness of virtuosic doowopping

has been to infantilize it, making it analogous to the babble of babies (i.e.,



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not barbarians). A second has been to frame it as novelty. In practice,

these methods are often combined. Rhino Records sells a CD called Doo-

Wop For Kids: Rubber Biscuits And Rama Lama Ding Dongs. The pro-

motional blurb for the recording reads:

Grown-ups love 50s doo-wop and now kids can too with this lighthearted

collection of the genres silliest hits. Also includes liner notes by Dr. Demento!

(http://www.Rhino.com/store/ProductDetail.lasso?Number=7558)

Theyre silly. In fact, Dr. Dementos liner notes say that Doowop

must be the silliest music ever invented. One reason we know that theyre

silly is because we know that song lyrics are supposed to be meaningful.25

And we know that meaningful in this context means poetic devices wed-ded to sense. And we know this because we have naturalized an emergent

ideology of bourgeois modernity about how language works, what lan-

guage is for, and how language relates to other cultural domains, includ-

ing for instance music and understanding.

The Apache dog story

Let me end this exploration with a final sonic but non-musical example. It

is a story told by Drew Lacapa at a public gathering on the San Carlos

Apache reservation in 1995. Lacapa is a monolingual English speaker,

but this does not keep him from critiquing the ideology that speaking asingle language will somehow result in meaningful communication.26

1 lo:::ng time ago.

2 actually not too long ago

3 last week.

4 there was these Indian dogs.

5 they were running across the side of the road.

6 rea:::lly whackin at the cars tires.

7 ri ri ri ri ri ri ri ri ri

8 you know how the kids dogs do

9 they run out and bite the tires?

10 car drives o

11 vhuuuuu12 people who own white

13 white peoples dogs were on the other side.

14 car drives up.

15 dogs go

314 D. Samuels


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16 bowwow bowwow, bowwow bowwow

17 dont e:::::ven grab the tires

18 stay right on the sidewalk

19 get on the grass.

20 dont even get on the road.

21 bowwow, bowwow

22 wuuuuuu

23 car drives o.

24 pretty soon the white dogs looked at those Indian peoples dogs and

said

25 Hey!

26 dont get up on the tire thats DANgerous.

27 stay on the side of the road28 be ORganized.

29 dont say ri ri ri ri ri

30 gaa, wild Indian DOGS?

31 be ORganized!

32 say bowwow, bowWOW!

33 a::::ll lookat each other like,

34 whos this guy tellin us what to do

35 white peoples dogs.

36 you know?

37 scratchin their mange?

38 pretty soon another car comes by.

39 big pickup truck.

40 a::::ll those Indian dogs

41 start running wild.

42 didnt get on the road?

43 stayed, on the sidewalk?

44 a:ll of, em start saying bowwow, bowwow!

45 bowwow, bowwow!

46 bowwow, bowwow!

47 a:::::ll ways and the car took o

48 huuuuuu

49 pretty soon they all turned to one another looked at each other and

said

50 e:::, bow wow.

51 and thats how the word e:came to be.

There are many things I could discuss about this performance the

way in which it satirizes traditional myths, with its calquing of Apache

narrative openings (doo anida a long time ago); the etiological ending



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that seals the eect of the satirization; the multiplicity of vocal styles that

Drew Lacapa employs in performing his canine characters. But at the

moment I simply want to attend to the idea that the white dogs tell the

Apache dogs how to be civilized by telling them what to say. In order to

be organized, in part, you should stop saying riririririri and instead say

bowwow. This distinction between varieties of nonsense brings the prob-

lem of meaningful communication to consciousness. I should say that in

good ethnographic fashion I decided that in order to understand this joke

I needed to understand the meaning of the interjection in the last two

lines of the joke. I spoke with a number of consultants about it, collecting

various glosses of the interjection e. A few months later, someone pointed

out to me, when I asked him about it, that the joke wasnt about mean-

ing; it was about barking. He said, You know how white people are. Itslike theyre the only ones who know how to talk. A white person will al-

ways tell you what youre doing wrong, even if its just doing nothing,

you know? So in that, its like even our barking is better than your

barking you know, even though its just dogs barking. Some peoples

nonsense is more meaningful than other peoples.

Conclusion

What is doowop, anyway? Maybe it is just stupidity, a bunch of hood-

lums on a street corner singing diiip dip didip, didip, didip, didip, daa. I

have attempted to argue here that it perhaps makes sense to defend stu-

pidity in the age of modernity; perhaps stupidity carries indexical criti-

cism of mainstream coherence in its wake, willful dismantling of the gag-

rule amenities which normally pass for coherence, as Nathaniel Mackey

writes of scat singing (quoted in Edwards 2002).

I am not claiming that languages ability to refer and to mean is un-

important. I am claiming that modernitys ideological means of power-

fully naturalizing semantic content as the overwhelmingly central defini-

tion of language is, perhaps, historically unique. While the referential

power of language has always, in some sense, been at the core of its phil-

osophical import, the importance of transparency of transmission was

uniquely highlighted beginning in the seventeenth century, when contact

with hundreds of unique languages in the colonial encounter posed in-

teractional and communicative challenges, and brought questions of in-telligibility and unintelligibility of phonetic and syntactic material to the

center of European thought about the world. In this environment

which included not only the ascendancy of vernacular dialects and

national languages over the former dominance of Latin, but also the de-

316 D. Samuels


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ployment of numerous trade jargons and pidgins in interactions between

Europeans and the world, not to mention the development of Creole

languages in various European colonial contexts ( Bakker 1997; Chau-

denson 2001; Hymes 1971; Romaine 1988) it is perhaps inevitable that

colonizing powers might discover the idea that language is created in

situations where people have a need to communicate clearly with one

another. But this ideology is historically situated, as is the development of

the lexicon that accompanies it. While the English verb to mean in

both its sense of purpose or intent (as in what do you mean to do about

it?) and in its sense of verbal signification (as in what does hypochon-

driac mean?) dates in the OED to the ninth century, it was with the

rise of modernity that the word began to be used more expansively. The

first documented written appearance of its nominal form meaning occurred in the fourteenth century, with derivations of that form (mean-

ingful, meaningless), appearing even more recently. We can see the con-

tinuation of this lexico-semantic emphasis resonating in a number of

contemporary cultural practices and ideologies: the current American

notion that democracy would work better if we all talked the same way;

that questions about language are best framed as the problem of guaran-

teeing unfettered transference of thoughts from brain to brain; that de-

fining your terms is the best way to guarantee a felicitous debate; that all

languages are equal because they can all refer to the world equally well;

that language revitalization programs should take the form of vocabulary

lessons.

In a nutshell, the problem of modernity is the problem of meaning. It

isnt necessarily that this meaning wins out, or this other meaning wins

out. Its that meaning wins out over ambiguity, over nonsense, over

poetry by holding out the hope that somehow, somewhere, pure

transparent communication should be possible. This hope exists on a

continuum, with sense/language/logic at one end and nonsense/music/

art gravitating toward the other. The ideal end of the spectrum in which

language takes on the guise of mathematics was the dream of the logical

positivists. Part of Wittgensteins break with that modernist sense of lan-

guage for philosophy lay in his ability to imagine nonsense. Arguing that

Understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme

in music than one may think, Wittgenstein pulled apart the logical bonds

that had held language and the world together.27 Wittgenstein argued

that the logic of imagining was not like the logic of language, for Wordlanguage allows of senseless combinations of words, but the language of

imagining does not allow us to imagine anything senseless. Driving home

the distinction, Wittgenstein continued, It would be possible to imagine

people who had something not quite unlike a language: a play of sounds,



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without vocabulary or grammar. The example Wittgenstein parentheti-

cally appended to his observation was Speaking with tongues, but he

certainly could have been describing doowop as well.

For a seventeenth-century modern like Locke, conversely, language

was a map of the meaningful entities existing in the world, and so the

logic of language and the logic of imagining were closely aligned. In a

telling passage in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in the

chapter titled Of the Abuse of Words Locke wrote: He that hath

Names without Ideas, wants Meaning in his Words (III, x, 33).

Of course, in the struggle between meaning and nonsense, meaning

wins a lot, and from our perspective its hard to see how it could be any

other way. To say that meaninglessness should win is like saying that

maybe things could fall up when we let go of them. But even if it fallsdown instead of up, Id like to suggest that we let go of our own fetish-

ization of meaning as the key to language and culture. This anthropo-

logical truism codified in the normal science of the discipline through

textbook titles like Man Makes Sense (Hammel and Simmons 1970) is

hard to kill. And Im not suggesting that we kill it. But I do want to sug-

gest that it may blind us to some very important linguistic and semiotic

practices in numerous communities impacted by modernitys onslaught

of standard dialects, national languages, and communicative codification

practices that pose ideological challenges to the notion that making

sense is the basis for language.28 Our challenge is to understand what

theyre saying even though and perhaps because it doesnt make

sense.

Notes

* Acknowledgements: This paper was originally presented in November 2000, as part

of the session Linguistic Modernity and its Discontents: Mixed Evidence, Hybrid

Models, at the 99th annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in

San Francisco, California. My thanks to James Wilce for asking me to participate; to

the other panel participants, Jane Goodman, Margaret Bender, and Janina Fenigsen;

and to our discussants, Asif Agha and John McCreery. Thanks also to Jackie Urla,

Bob Paynter, Calla Jacobson, Donal Carbaugh, Benjamin Bailey, Stephen Olbrys,

Steven Feld, and Norma Mendoza-Denton, whose critiques and encouragement in

response to earlier versions of this essay were crucial to its development. As ever, all

errors and omissions remain my responsibility.

1. My choice of doowop is deliberate, as my sense is that there is a relationship between

the transgressive and disparaged linguistic practices of the genre and the race-based

and class-based maginalized social status of its most prominent performers.

2. Like many modern terms in social science, modernity has been a dicult concept

to pin down. A list of the concepts, events, and phenomena brought under this term

318 D. Samuels


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range from the Enlightenment and the rise of the scientific method to the discovery of

single-point perspective or Leonardos anatomical studies, from the industrial revolu-

tion to the rise of mass media, from the advent of ethnic nationalism, the birth of

sociology, the discovery of the folk and the foundations of folkloristics in the after-

math of urbanization, the beginnings of colonialism, the reformation, the counter-

reformation, globalization all have been suggested as possible beginnings for what is

subsumed under the modern. Bruno Latour (1993), of course, suggests that none of

this matters.

It is not my purpose here to pin down the term. For the purposes of this article

for I can imagine others in which the decision would be dierent I take modernity

in something like Anthony Giddenss (1991) sense: modes of social life or organisation

which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards and which

subsequently became more or less worldwide in their influence (1991: 1). The advent of

the kinds of institutional and intersubjective shifts that Giddens writes about also co-

incide with a suite of changes in the way philosophers and other critical writers seem tohave thought about language. My view here is also congruent with approaches to

modernity growing out of Weberian perspectives on the forces of rationalization in

post-Enlightenment European society, both in the realm of politics and philosophy.

3. Included in this practice in doowop are Chinese (The Five Keys Ling Ting Tong,

Gladys Knight and the Pips Ching Chong), Japanese (Rang Tang Ding Dong), Af-

rican primitives (Little Anthony and the Imperials Shimmy Shimmy Koko Bop),

and Martian (the Boss-Tones Mope-ity Mope), to name a few. In fact, Dead Dog

Records, a doowop reissue label, has collected 31 examples of these Orientalist per-

formances on a CD titled My Chinese Girl. The practice is certainly not limited to

doowop. Writing of scat singing in jazz, Brent Hayes Edwards observes, from the very

beginnings of scat . . . the form was concerned with the representation of the foreign

(2002: 627). This practice extends into some of the vocable figures of hip-hop as well.

Hear, for example, Redmans Blow Your Mind (Remix) on Whut? Thee Album, or

Slick Ricks Indian Girl on The Great Adventures of Slick Rick (Rafi Crockett, per-

sonal communication).4. All of this is made more complicated by the fact that doowop performers notably

urban African-Americans and Italian-Americans likely spoke non-dominant, non-

standard, marginalized dialects of English. But see Kochman (1983) and Reisman

(1970) on the role of strategic ambiguity in marginalized performances of dominant

languages.

5. The use of the English term policing has proven dicult. As Gordon writes, .. . Po-

lizeiwissenschaft, or science of police (although the English word policy is arguably a

better equivalent to this meaning of Polizei) (Gordon 1991: 10).

6. Poetics is implicated in this statistical coincidence as well. As Lavery discusses, Whorf

and Wallace Stevens toiled for the same Hartford insurance company at the same time.

7. One could easily use the ascendancy of Castilian in Spain, Tuscan in Italy, or RP in

England as Francien in France in such a discussion.

8. An analogous notion that clarity and sensible meaning will result from the rule of de-

contextualized univocality can be found in a phonological element of the present day

argument against Ebonics: the claim that because /aks/ in English is a semantically

distinct word from /ask/, its use as an interrogative marker in AAVE therefore some-

how opens potential for confusion between speakers.

9. The dominance of Johnsons work was such that for more than a century it was

referred to simply as the Dictionary (Nist 1976: 278).

10. For a discussion of contractualism, see Harris 1996.



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11. By etymological reckoning, rage is a radical element, a free-standing noun, whereas

outrage, far from being a special form of rage, is rather the combination of the Latin-

derived ultra- prefix, and a sux that, when attached to a word such as bag-, is pro-

nounced with a neutral schwa (Culler 1988: 3).

12. Abraham reads the cosyn/cosynage pun as a performative, arguing that the pun does

what it represents. That is, the pun on relation and deception is itself a model of what a

pun is: a relationship between words that is, at the same time, a deception.

13. Another interpretation of the modern bourgeois family is that it ceased to be an eco-

nomic institution and became a space of personal intimacy (J. Wilce, personal com-

munication).

14. In fact, when Chaucer used the ME words glose and glosynge, they carried a double

meaning: both interpretation and flattery. See e.g. the Summoners Tale lines 128

129, and the Wife of Baths Prologue, line 514.

15. Justman continues: As opposed to Dante, Chaucer is fascinated with counterfeiting

with false relics, bogus alchemy, counterfeit keys, unauthentic statements, literary fal-sifications, false fronts of all kinds (1980: 204).

16. I have altered the translation in Redferns text. Ce nest que jeux de mots, quaecta-

tion pure, Et ce nest point ainsi que parle la nature.

17. Empson himself described the inevitability of an acknowledgement of ambiguity in the

twentieth century. Nineteenth-century editions of Shakespeare, he observes, move

ambiguity into footnotes that describe all the potential meanings of a Shakespearean

usage, but which insist that one of those meanings is the correct one. Thus I believe the

nineteenth-century editor secretly believed in a great many of his alternatives at once

. . . The eighteenth-century editor had none of this . . . his object was to unmix the

metaphors as quickly as possible, and generally restore the text to a rational and ship-

shape condition (Empson 1930: 82). Empson mentions as in recent atomic physics as

justification for the shift toward indeterminacy of the linguistic object; and Jonathan

Bate (1998) credits Empsons prior training in mathematics and his exposure to Ein-

steins writings on relativity for the literary theorists quantum Shakespeare under-

standing of poetic indeterminacy.18. Lest we forget, Poetic Diction is subtitled A Study in Meaning.

19. Along similar lines, Joel Kuipers (1998) has discussed a modernizing shift in naming

practices among the Subamun in Indonesia, involving the bleaching of the extra-

semantic qualities of personal names. That is, names were no longer meant to evoke

a network of social relations, but rather were used to simply index the individual

named.

20. For instance, Spinden (1933) quotes the following lines from Horatio Hales 1883

Iroquois Book of Rites:

Woe! Woe!

Hearken ye!

We are diminished!

Woe! Woe!

The cleared land has become a thicket

Woe! Woe! (Hale 1883[1969], quoted in Spinden 1933: 52)

21. Boone has also received lots of self-deprecating I didnt understand rock n roll

storytelling mileage out of his supposed misguided desire to change the words Aint

That a Shame (from the Fats Domino song) to Isnt That a Shame, because aint

was incorrect English.

22. I do not deny the importance of political consciousness here the distinction between

political and politicized, for instance.

320 D. Samuels


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23. This shift makes the addressee of the utterance problematic. In the first occurrence of

the line, it is easy enough to imagine that the lead singer is addressing the audience as

you. In the second refrain, however, it is unclear whether the background vocalists are

addressing the audience or the lead singer himself.

24. I can only note briefly here the interesting fact that doowop passed between two

marginalized groups during the 1950s and 1960s the African-American and Italian-

American communities of major urban centers.

25. The triumph of this ideology can be seen in the publication of anthologies of rock song

lyrics for reading as poetry, absent the beat (Goldstein 1969; Pichaske 1981). Whether

this would be Steve Allens or Phil Spectors nightmare-come-true is anyones guess.

26. A note on the transcription: Italic script indicates stress. Lengthening of vowels is in-

dicated by colons following.

27. Benjamin Lee Whorf also unstitched these bonds, arguing not for nonsense, but for

relativist logics based in linguistic experience.

28. In an odd coincidence, 1957, the year that Rang Tang Ding Dong was released, wasalso the year that Chomskys Syntactic Structures was published. While the logician

Chomsky surely does not endorse illogic, his fascination with ambiguous sentences

(John was frightened by the new methods) is an important feature of his challenge to

long-standing notions about the semantic basis of language in the Western intellectual

tradition.

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David Samuels (b. 1959) is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Mas-

sachusetts at Amherst . His principal research interests are

linguistic anthropology, poetics, language and music, contemporary identity, and NativeAmerican culture. His recent publications include The whole and the sum of the parts,

or, how Cookie and the Cupcakes told the story of Apache history in San Carlos (1999);

Indeterminacy and history in Britton Goodes Western Apache placenames: ambiguous

identity on the San Carlos Apache reservation (2001); and Putting a Song on Top of It:

Expression and Identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation (forthcoming).



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language, meanng, modernity, doowop

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