Does it really matter what we call something? I doubt Romeo was thinking about linguistic theory when he pleaded with Juliet to forget the silly names keeping them apart, telling her “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”; but his point, that a name is arbitrary and doesn’t change the smell — or other qualities — of the thing it refers to is by now such an established notion that while reading this sentence many of you called up “signifier” and “signified” in your head. But are Romeo (and Saussure) missing something? Does Romeo’s claim for floriculture extend to human culture?

Ride the virtual waves to most major newspapers and magazines across Europe and you’ll find that the articles dealing with books, dance, visual arts, theatre, music and film are all classified under the rubric “Culture.” It is as true for the Germanic languages as for the Romance, and even in England, the home of that gloriously wealthy hybrid of the two, the Guardian, Economist and Telegraph all classify these endeavors as culture. Catch the current back to our shores and you’ll find that — excepting a few, mostly East Coast publications — American papers, the Deseret News and the Salt Lake Tribune included, classify the same activities under “Entertainment” (a few, like our own City Weekly, lie somewhere in between with the A&E — Arts and Entertainment — classification).

Words have power, and the names we give to our human endeavors have the capacity to affect those endeavors. What do we get with “entertainment”? Something its root, the Latin tenere meaning “to hold,” suggests: we get something designed to hold our attention for a short period of time — the ninety minutes of a feature film, the three and a half minutes of a commercially viable pop song, or the 140 characters of an online message — before being forgotten. Entertainment is meant to be produced, consumed and discarded, the outcome of a disposable society.

Culture, on the other hand, with its root in cult, suggests a place one inhabits or worships in, a communal project, the type of thing that is saved and preserved, developed, a patrimony one passes on to the next generation.

Is it that we are talking about two different activities, and the problem is our publications have room for only one category? Why is it, then, that we overwhelmingly opt for the cheaper version?

I doubt Romeo would have cared either way. All he wanted to do was get up that balcony.

When he finally did, I wonder what happened? Okay, I know what happened, but what I wonder is, what did they call it? Were they “having sex” or “making love”? In our cynical and ironic age some of us find it difficult to voice the latter, but if we’re always describing what goes on in our bedrooms with the passive and banal “having sex,” maybe that’s all we’ll ever have. And if we keep calling the arts entertainment maybe that’s all they’ll ever get.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.