On The Media In the parlance of Republican-primary politics, “sanctuaryâ€? – as in sanctuary city – has become a bad word.

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GEOFFREY NUNBERG: Well, sometime around 2005, 2006, you begin to hear people on the right using the word, not for these cities and movements that aimed at providing specifically political asylum, but rather to cities that said, look, we just don’t think it’s our business to have our local officials helping the INS.

We don’t want to discourage witnesses from coming forth in criminal cases. We don’t want to discourage parents from bringing their children to emergency rooms. We don’t want to discourage children from coming to school.

So using sanctuary to describe these cities would be sort of like saying that the military, because of its don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy, has become a sanctuary for homosexuals [BOB LAUGHS]because you’re not supposed to be there but we’re not going to ask whether that’s what you’re doing or not.

BOB GARFIELD: Mitt Romney has seized on this word “sanctuary.” Do you think sanctuary is the word that he’s actually trying to communicate or is he trying to use it as a kind of a code for something even more offensive to conservatives?

GEOFFREY NUNBERG: Well, I think sanctuary is very closely related to amnesty. It evokes that word “illegal,” which is used as a noun only to describe people’s immigration status. You don’t say that Jack Abramoff was an illegal because he lobbied illegally, for example.

And, in fact, the word “illegal” has always been used in just that way. It was first introduced in the English language by the British in the 1930s and early ’40s to describe Jews who illegally emigrated to Palestine.

There are some questions here we may want to ask of Nunberg. On the one hand this sort of lexical reframing is perfectly common and  there is nothing strange about it (as much as  we may disagree with its politics).  Why do we then need a linguist to explain it to us? Nunberg’s intervention is problematic in two senses. First, his description of the process is more of a description of a folk theory of the appropriateness of mappings than a real linguistic theory. And second, the all too common assumption of an expert mantle provides legitimacy to statements that are politically engaged. I’m not trying to criticize a fellow linguist (a much more successful one, to boot) for getting engaged in politics. I’m all for that and I agree with his criticism. But this engagement is not linguistics in the sense of disengaged inquiry into the workings of language and communication. It is just engagement in frame negotiation where certain features of the process of language change are hypostasized and exposed to explicit negotiation. This, just like the subject under investigation, is extremely common.

In fact, the last paragraph is engaging in exactly the same “smear campaign” by connotation that the Romney’s of the world like so much. But reminding us that something was first used against Jews is certainly not a neutral context setter.

Again, I disagree with neither Nunberg’s linguistics nor his politics but there’s more to the story than that (as there so often is).