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QJM Advance Access published online on June 29, 2009
QJM, doi:10.1093/qjmed/hcp084
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Physicians. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

When I use a word ... Declarative titles

Jeff Aronson

The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below.

           ‘Can saying make it so?’

J. L. Austin, ‘How to do things with words’

William James Lectures, 1955 (OUP, 1962)

This piece has an indicative title—it tells you what it is about. I could have given it a declarative title, one that declares that something is so, such as ‘Declarative titles are deceptive’.

The Indo-European root KLA, to call or cry out, shout, resound, has spawned a wide range of words, such as claim, acclaim, declaim, exclaim, proclaim and reclaim; clamour; clarinet and clarion; class and classify. Of the seven different entries for the noun ‘clam’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, the one relevant here is defined as ‘the crash caused by ringing two or more bells of a peal together’; the bivalve that implies the opposite, i.e. silently clamming . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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