Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep/ And in his simple show he harbours treason

I thought about getting picky about Eugene Volokh's first post about 'traitor' and a libel suit. But it seemed, well, a picky point. But he's sticking, so I'll pick.

Eugene says:

It is a fact of social life that the word "traitor" means different things in different situations. Sometimes it means someone who has committed the crime of treason. Sometimes it means someone who you think has violated some moral obligation (that's how "traitor" was used in the labor context, in the Austin case). Sometimes it means someone who you think is working, albeit perfectly lawfully, against the interests of his country.

It seems to me that the word 'traitor' only ever (apart from very extraordinary circumstances) refers to those guilty of the crime of treason. Sometimes (most of the time) speakers intentionally apply the term to those obviously innocent of that crime, by way of making claims that are not obviously false. But speaker meaning and word meaning (sentence meaning) are distinct and readily distinguishable. If Jones calls me a 'traitor', because I didn't chip in for drinks, he means I have failed to fulfill a moral obligation. The word maintains its semantic valence, above the beery fray. He has said one thing, but obviously meant something else by it.

There are a couple reasons for insisting on this, pedantic as it seems. First, I don't think a half decent analysis of Jones' rhetoric is possible if you don't appreciate that he has literally said I'm guilty of treason, although he obviously doesn't think I am, or intend others to think he thinks I am, let alone intend that others think I am. Jones' allegation is hyperbole. And hyperbole cannot exist if word meaning doesn't stay tolerably fixed.

Second - what is really the same point, coming from a different direction - if you contextually transmute meanings in the manner Eugene advocates, semantic absurdities result. For example, it will probably turn out that Ann Coulter is right that 'all liberals are traitors'. The truth of this sentence, uttered by Ann, will follow more or less trivially from certain of her beliefs. But surely we don't actually believe that the proper way to analyze Coulter is by interpreting her as speaking Coulterese, a colorful dialect of English. Nor is she somehow a context unto herself, within which word-meaning warps. (Well, she probably is. But that's a separate question.) If, in her mouth, 'treason' meant something so anodyne as 'in my opinion, works lawfully against the interests of the country', she would have picked a different word to put on her cover, because she meant her cover to SAY something far more shocking and controversial.

A picky point.

UPDATE: Thanks to Matthew Yglesias for tracking back approvingly. It occurs to me, rereading Eugene's post and my own, that the following point deserves emphasis. It's really the crux. Eugene writes:

Perhaps it would be better if human language, as it was actually used, was more rigid and unambiguous, with different words always being used to capture these different meanings, and with no-one ever speaking figuratively or hyperbolically. But that's not the way human beings actually talk. And the law is built for humans, not Vulcans, and it recognizes the reality of what words actually mean to listeners, not what they should mean.

I think it is commonly thought that those who take the line I have taken are to some degree beguiled by a willow-the-wisp of analytic and/or rational purity. We like pure, formal languages and so hallucinate that our natural language is one. Desire for semantic accounts to be analytically neat and clean causes us to neglect the rough, impure nitty-gritty of context, use, rhetoric, so forth. It seems to me that the opposite is the case. The advantage of the line I have taken is, first and foremost, that it allows one to analyze uses of, e.g. 'traitor' as figurative and/or hyperbolic, and explain how all that works. Eugene is not in a position to do so (so it seems to me, because if 'traitor' really means all the different things he says, then all the uses that we might have thought were figurative or hyperbolic turn out to be literal. And there is nothing to analyze.)

None of these thoughts are original: it is Grice-Searle-Davidson-inspired philosophy of language.