5.4: Unintended Innuendo

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Bradley H. Dowden
California State University Sacramento

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Here is a letter from Anne's parents to her elementary school teacher:

Anne was late because she was not early ... She is too slow to be quick.

If you were Anne's teacher, you would notice the implication that Anne is dimwitted, but you'd discount it as sloppy communication because you would apply the principle of charity and figure out what the parent probably meant instead.

An innuendo is a negative suggestion made by disguised references or veiled comments about a person. If your professor were to write a letter of recommendation to graduate school for you that said, "This student always managed to spell his (or her) name correctly," you would be upset by the innuendo. The professor is using innuendo to suggest you have few talents; being able to spell one's own name correctly is such a minor positive feature that the reader is likely to believe the writer cannot find anything more positive to say. This letter is an example of damning with faint praise.

Exercise \(\PageIndex{1}\)

Identify the innuendo in the following passage.

The vice-president is a man who projects the image of being honest.

Answer: The innuendo is that the vice-president is not as honest as his public relations image would suggest.

If you call your opponent a "possible liar," you are insinuating something. You aren't specifically charging that he is a liar, but you aren't exactly withholding the charge either.

Imagine that you are a university professor who has been asked to write a short letter of recommendation for a student, Juanita Barrena, who wants to be admitted to social work graduate school. Here are two recommendation letters. Notice that they both state the same facts, yet one is positive, and one is negative. How could that be?

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The emotional tone of the second letter is more animated and positive. For example, the second says "capturing an A-," which is more positive than "getting an A- instead of an A." In the second letter, Carver says he is "delighted to have been asked" to write the letter, but in the first letter he says he is "surprised" to have been asked, raising the possibility that the request was an unpleasant surprise. The second letter is longer, showing that the professor gave more attention to the student's request. The typos in the first letter are a sign of Carver's inattention. In the second letter, Carver added his phone number, demonstrating his willingness to talk further if the admissions committee desires; doing so is evidence he believes Barrena is worthy of some extra effort on his part.