I’m not even objecting to to the idea that “Gordon” is after this money, as if the Prime Minister is going to turn up at your wake, stuff a roll of fifties in his trouser pocket and then go for a slap-up lunch. Gordon Brown’s personal unpopularity makes this a good gambit even though convention dictates that when you personalise taxation as a money-grabbing exercise it’s the Chancellor, not the PM, who’s supposed to be chasing you with a butterfuly net. Alistair Darling just isn’t as disliked as Brown, so Brown has been substituted. This is a well-worn robber-baron fantasy that the right loves to wheel out, and again it will play well with the people the ad was written for.

I’m not even complaining about the notion that Gordon “wants” this money, implying — as, once again, the right are wont to do — that Labour simply enjoy levying taxes. £20,000 to pay for your care in old age is actually an astonishing bargain, not a “R.I.P. off”, but the idea that taxes are raised in order to be spent on services you might want to use is, obviously, rather destructive of the intended message. The ad suggests that this is just another in a long line of things the socialist revolutionaries are doing to the middle classes out of spite.

Let’s also leave aside that the actual claim here is that Labour ministers have refused to rule out the possibility of a mandatory flat-rate tax on estates as one of a whole family of proposals for how to pay for care of the elderly. This is not the same as Labour planning to take up this option, and certainly not the same as “Gordon” wanting to do so. Still, this is a perfectly valid subject on which to raise concerns and have a debate. And finally, let’s not even engage with the question of whether, in voting for a party in a representative democracy, you are also voting for each and every thing they might do for the next five years as well.

No, the big issue for me is that the poster addresses me — and you — directly. The word “you” is an indexical, meaning it points out of the proposition at something in the world, but depending on where the proposition is said — or, in this case, by whom it’s read — the meaning expressed changes. When Kitchener pointed out of the poster at YOU, he may or may not have wanted you, depending on your age, physical fitness and, indeed, nationality.

In this case (and most others) indexical “you” is “unbound”, meaning roughly that the rest of the proposition doesn’t fix its reference in a helpful way. For instance, if the poster had said “If the eligible portion of your estate is worth more than £200,000, then Gordon wants…” that might have been more truthful. Because there’s nothing like this in the poster, the “you” refers to literally every reader: the visiting tourist, the feckless non-owner of property and, of course, anyone else to whom it doesn’t apply.

Frege gave us a handy way to unpack indexicals: replace them with a “definite description” that doesn’t include an indexical. So instead of “you”, what would we put? “The person reading this poster”? I don’t think so, because that would be wrong. Now some more thought needs to be undertaken: who does Goron actually want to take the money off? How can we describe those people accurately?

I’m not suggesting that people writing copy for campaign posters start doing this; that would be silly. In any case, campaign posters are supposed to stir the emotions, not state factual claims. I do, though, think a bit more care is needed when using that big Kitchener YOU in these contexts unless the parties want to be accused of abandoning the facts altogether. We have enough cynicism about mainstream politics in this country already, thanks.

The word I got from Huddleston & Pullum was “ditransitive”. A ditransitive verb takes two objects. “Throw” can be ditransitive, like this:

Jane threw John the ball

Here Jane is the subject, “the one doing the verb” in schoolchildren’s terms. There are two objects: a direct object, the ball, which is being thrown and an indirect object, John, who’s having something thrown to him.

Interestingly, “throw” can also be monotransitive, meaning it takes one object:

Jane threw the ball

but it can’t be intransitive, meaning it takes none at all:

Jane threw

Now, my tiny revelation about emancipation is that we should, when we’re thinking about it seriously, always be able to associate three nouns with it: an emancipator, someone who’s emancipated (which could be the same person, of course) and something from which the latter is emancipated:

X emancipated Y from Z

We need to know who’s being emancipated and, crucially, from what. There’s no emancipation pure and simple, just like there’s no throwing without something that gets thrown. We need to know who did the emancipating, who was emancipated and what they were emancipated from.

[Note: I'm not making a grammatical point here. Technically speaking, my grammarian friends (thanks for coming), Y is not functioning as an indirect object here but as part of a prepositional phrase and in fact the verb "emancipate" doesn't even license ditransitivity. Still, I hope you can see what I'm getting at.]

This is important in political writing where some or all of these things are assumed. Freire, for instance, was working in the 1970s with peasant labourers under the military dictatorship in Brazil. His goal was democratization, in part through mass education. It’s important, in understanding what he wanted and what he was doing, to understand the three nouns that go with the verb, especially when the verb gets turned into a noun and becomes a rallying-call: Emancipation!

In fact this is an example of a general critical thinking point I’d like to make. For example, this is grammatically fine:

Jane emancipated John

but it’s only useful if we can say what it means. The truth is that without context it could mean Jane did almost anything to John. In order to be able to tell what I need the two objects rather than just one.

This may, in fact, be part of a general malaise about missing objects. The old “avoid the passive” prescription is sometimes said to be because the passive voice is “vague about agency”, which on the face of it is nonsense. This passive-voice sentence from a story in The Telegraph isn’t vague about agency at all:

Witnesses say Neda was shot by the Basij militia

Quick, who shot Neda? There, see? Easy, wasn’t it? Yet this one from the BBC is indeed vague about agency, probably out of necessity since no suspect had yet been named:

UK tourist shot dead in Texas bar

If there’s a bad guy here (aside from those doing the shooting) it’s not the passive voice but the missing noun. Once again, I’m not complaining about this on grammatical or stylistic grounds but on intellectual ones; unless some context fills me in, I can’t tell from this sentence what happened, and that’s what I want out of it. As I said, this may be valid: in the BBC example we don’t know who did the shooting yet, so we can’t say.

So it is with other missing nouns. With “emancipate” my claim is that it expresses an idea with at least three moving parts. A sentence using that verb, or its context, really should provide them. Too often this doesn’t happen: it’s simply assumed that “we” understand what’s meant, as if this “we” is somehow static and known. This leads to the absurdity, for example, of Paulo Freire’s work being hijacked from its historical and socio-political context and used to justify all kinds of talk in utterly different contexts.

This leads me to another personal hobby-horse of mine: local theory. You can’t take a political theory “out” of its socio-historical context without reifying it, turning it into a sort of Platonic object rather than a particular, located practice. As soon as you’ve done that it’s become a piece of junk that’s likely to get in the way, and the only work worth doing with it is taking it out and throwing it in a skip.

The picture is North Korean Propaganda, by Luke Stephens. Creative Commons license