Taylor Swift gets a lot of flak for writing almost exclusively about breakups. After all, there are only so many ways to breathe new life into overdone narratives about agonizing heartbreak. But that doesn’t deter Taylor. The Fearless album is packed with break up songs: Of the twenty songs on the original Fearless, nine described breakups, and all six of the “From the Vault” tracks were break up songs as well. It’s a testament to Swift’s craftsmanship that she’s able to give each of these songs a texture and style that makes them unique even though they share the same subject matter. “Mr. Perfectly Fine,” a “From the Vault” track on the Fearless album, offers a perfect example: Though like most of the album, it discusses Taylor Swift’s split with Joe Jonas, “Mr. Perfectly Fine” stands out from a sea of breakup songs because of the way it utilizes wordplay.
Relying on the ambiguities of language, “Mr. Perfectly Fine” plays with the multiple definitions of words. Swift writes, “I was Miss here to stay/ Now I’m Miss gonna be alright someday/ And someday maybe you’ll miss me,” with these clever turns-of-phrase and lyrical complexity making an otherwise typical pop song entertaining. But the wordplay in the song does more than just make it interesting; It demonstrates how the different definitions of a word can alter the whole meaning of a song.
In particular, the ambiguity around the word “fine” allows the listener to interpret what Swift’s impression of her ex is post-breakup. By calling Jonas “Mr. Perfectly Fine,” the song offers multiple valid ways to understand how Taylor feels about her ex. On the one hand, the more obvious interpretation is that Jonas is “Mr. Perfectly Fine” because he’s moved on from the breakup— he’s doing fine after it— leaving Swift angry and jealous. Lines like “Hello, Mr. Perfectly Fine/ How’s your heart after breaking mine?” bolster this reading. But at other points it seems like Jonas is “Mr. Perfectly Fine” because he’s adequate, simply fine but nothing great, as Swift calls out her ex’s emotional mediocrity by saying, “Well I thought you might be different than the rest/ I guess you’re all the same.” Throughout the song, these two different denotations of “fine” allow Swift to layer meaning and introduce complexity to the narrative.
By using wordplay, Swift takes a stand in a larger debate about the nature of language. She rejects the view that language is concrete and unambiguous– the way Augustine of Hippo thought it was when he described the process of acquiring language as simply learning which terms refer to which objects. As he put it, “When they named any thing, and as they spoke turned towards it, I saw and remembered that they called what they would point out by the name they uttered. And that they meant this thing and no other was plain from the motion of their body…by constantly hearing words, as they occurred in various sentences, I collected gradually for what they stood.” Learning language is only this easy when terms have singular, concrete definitions, not when wordplay and dual meanings abound as they do in Swift’s songs. Augustine’s comments detailing a view that language is concrete and unambiguous would do not fit with Swift’s perspective that language is complicated and confusing, which allows her to capitalize upon wordplay to make “Mr. Perfectly Fine” a puzzle.
Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein ridiculed those Augustine comments as a “primitive” understanding of language. Taking a page from Swift, Wittgenstein contended that language is interesting because it’s an ever-evolving, imprecise system of relationships between words and meanings – such that any term can have a number of different (but often related) definitions. Claiming, “Augustine's conception of language is like such an over-simple conception” because “It disperses the fog to study the phenomena of language in primitive kinds of application in which one can command a clear view of the aim and functioning of the words,” Wittgenstein asserted that the understanding of language as a system of words that held concrete definitions ignored what was interesting about language (For him, what’s interesting was the fog, or the intricate, complicated, not-quite-understandable relationships between meanings and words). Like Swift, he would have thought that playing with the multiple definitions of words and emphasizing the significant disconnects between various denotations was intellectually entertaining, so Wittgenstein would have loved “Mr. Perfectly Fine” for its wordplay.
But T.S. Eliot would not have. While Eliot wrote extensively about the imprecision and evolution of language, in his essay “The Perfect Critic” he complains about the growing fragmentation of language (It’s a tangent to his larger complaint about the failure of literary criticism in his day). Eliot believed that words were coming to have more different definitions because increasingly segmented academic disciplines and intellectual and cultural milieus were developing narrower and more specialized definitions of previously broadly understood terms – making it all the more difficult to understand someone else who might be using a recognizable word but with a completely new or incomprehensible definition. As Eliot put it, “When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when everyone knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not.” For him, the fact that different fields of knowledge created more opportunities for the same words to be used with different meanings indicated increasing intellectual and cultural fragmentation. As fun and entertaining as dual meanings might be in “Mr. Perfectly Fine,” Eliot would not have appreciated the proliferation of the multiple denotations of words that Swift relies on in the song.