In the last decade, the traditional phrase “to refer to” something has been almost entirely supplanted by a new formula: “referencing”. The other day, in an online report of an interview in the Daily Telegraph, Matt Hancock, recently the Health Secretary, was said to have “referenced his wife of 15 years”. It sounds as though he did something rather awful to her. But no, all he was doing was referring to her.
The form crops up all the time now: “Charlotte, Ben and I are beyond proud to have had such a big character in our lives,” she said, referencing the pair’s adult children” – an online news report, 15 March 2020. Once again, something unpleasant seems to be happening to a family member.
But it doesn’t have to be a near relation: “Apparently, the Health Secretary often referenced the film [Contagion] in meetings”- The Week, 6 February 2021. And it needn’t be an individual who does the referencing. Society at large can do it too, and the action may be projected into the distant past: in the late sixteenth century, we learn, “[the French king Henri III’s] fondness for wearing women’s clothing at court entertainments and his male companions, dubbed “mignons” who slavishly copied the royal dress, was referenced during his lifetime,” – news items, January 2021
The change follows a pattern that is common these days. First, it is quite unnecessary: it isn’t quicker to say or easier to understand: it’s just more apparently “technical” than “referring to”. The new phrase is lifted from the academic jargon of Semiotics, or the study of signs, and is no improvement on the older form but is steadily replacing it. The only explanation can be that it sounds more learned. In everyday prose, like these news reports, it’s pompous and stilted. Why on earth should one want to sound learned in everyday speech?
The fact is, of course, that – as I often point out – most people are not influenced by a wish to sound more sophisticated. They simply copy, without thinking, what they hear other people doing. Because others do it, they think it’s “cool”. This is how language changes.
When we refer to something or someone, we denote it or them as the object of our reference. Our reference signifies its object, which is, therefore, the “signified”. A big step was taken when ideas about the “signifier” and the “signified” moved from the realm of philosophy as it had been studied from the days of St Augustine of Hippo in the early fifth century to the late nineteenth, at the hands of a Swiss philosopher, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913).
Saussure’s ideas about semiotics were taken up in a big way after the Second World War by the French philosophers of the Structuralist school, which became very fashionable even while few people could understand it. (People love to give the impression that they understand the incomprehensible. It’s a general human failing. A great deal of modern art is founded on that principle.
Hans Andersen nailed it in The Emperor’s New Clothes.) Umberto Eco was a famous Semiotician. His novel The Name of the Rose has become a popular classic, enjoyed by many people who have perhaps never heard of Semiotics or Structuralism. It is really a detective story. One could argue that any whodunnit is an exercise in semiotics since it is usually a sequence of derivations from clues or signifiers and the assembly of a corresponding set of things signified, leading to a final all-embracing thing signified.
But I am contradicted by one of the most prominent figures of the movement, Jacques Derrida, who asserted (and I quote from Wikipedia, to which I am indebted here) that “signifier and signified are not fixed”. He coined the term “différance” relating to “the endless deferral of meaning” and to the absence of a “transcendent signified”. I hope you can make of that more than I can.
One of the most famous formulations of Structuralism was the notion that there is no such thing as objective, verifiable truth. All meaning is deferred, and facts are merely constructs, varying according to who is uttering them or “referencing” them.
Yes, I’m afraid that all of this, and much more of the same, is implied when we use the term “referencing” in place of “referring to”. It might make you pause and think before you speak, mightn’t it?