"Bread, Dammit!" and the justifiability of religious utterance

It’s always nice when a scholar uses a memorable illustration. I was reading Theology and Narrative, where the author Goldberg discusses the justifiability of religious utterances. Goldberg writes, “In the first place, there must be some linguistic convention common to both speaker and hearer alike such that ‘please pass the bread’ counts as a request. That is, were someone to say instead, ‘Bread, dammit!’ his utterance might be considered an order, a command, or a demand that the bread be passed, but it will not normally be justifiably taken as a request for bread because, quite simply, there is no convention in the language to the effect that ‘Bread, dammit!’ is a way of performing the speech-act of requesting.” For some reason, this paragraph has struck me as thoroughly hilarious, and I have been going around the house telling our cat Cricket and/or empty rooms “Bread, dammit!” (Note: as theorized in an earlier post, my usage of “Bread, dammit!” is technically an instance of a pseudoprofanity rather than actual profanity.) I figured, even if I couldn’t say the phrase as a request, at least I could say it as an order, and if I’m going to be ordering something around, it seems better to do it with the cat or with an empty room.

After making this determination, I was disappointed to read further and discover that, “For a request of bread to be in any way justified, there must at the very least be some bread available, someone who wants or needs it, and someone capable of passing it.” I think it’s sad that we live in a world in which we cannot justifiably tell our loved ones “Bread, dammit!” unless we really want bread, and we cannot ever tell our cats “Bread, dammit!” because they lack opposable thumbs and can't pass food. But if you think about the phrase, technically, it’s not ordering the listener to do anything. It could be a cry of despair, like, “Why does bread exist? Ye gods, why?” or, “There’s bread again, I cannot escape its ubiquitous Orwellian presence!” The very absence of context and the phrase’s ambiguity makes the phrase intrinsically funny. Go ahead and see if I’m not right. Find someone special and tell them “Bread, dammit!” and see if you don’t feel better about the world around you ... and maybe even the bread.