For centuries, silence has been treated as an absence: the absence of sound, speech or response. Lola Pons argues that it is far more consequential than that. In her new book, El dedo en los labios, published by Taurus, the Spanish philologist traces the many meanings attached to silence and uses its history to examine changes in language, politics, social behaviour and communication from the Middle Ages to the present.
Pons, a professor at the University of Seville, where she was born in 1976, is also a contributor to El País. In an interview published by El País, she describes silence as both a physical phenomenon and a powerful linguistic and social element. “Apparently it is the absence of sound; in physics it is the lack of acoustic magnitude, but it is such a powerful linguistic element that it has taken me from language to life,” she says. Her research, she adds, has allowed her to observe historical changes “from cloisters to social networks” through the impact of silence.
For Pons, one of the clearest contemporary examples is the “silence carriage” on trains. She recalls travelling in one when two women protested after discovering that talking was not permitted. Pons sees the arrangement very differently. “The inventor of the silence carriage deserves all my recognition, he has saved many of us, he has given us mental tranquillity,” she says. Silence, in her view, can itself be a form of respect: “sometimes your own silence is the way to respect someone else’s words”.
The railway once offered time for reflection, writing and introspection, she argues. That function has increasingly been displaced by the consumption of digital content. The change illustrates a wider transformation in which people may appear constantly connected while becoming less capable of sustained conversation or reflection. Pons says society has produced “a lot of silence full of words” through the verbosity of people who say little while continuing to talk.
She is particularly critical of the political uses of speech and silence. Politicians, she argues, often produce noise while withholding substantive answers, which she describes as “an enormous lack of honesty”. She says many voters would prefer a politician to admit that they have no opinion, need expert advice or believe an issue is too complicated to fit into a tweet. The problem, she says, is that society has confused everyone’s right to speak and vote with the assumption that everyone possesses an equally authoritative voice.
Pons also rejects the political expression “the silent majority”, calling it “a very dangerous phrase” because it can be used to manipulate voters and allow politicians to claim that they speak on behalf of an imagined majority. Citizens express their political choice at the ballot box and retain the right to protest or remain silent, she says, without that silence necessarily implying support for a dominant majority. She traces the popularisation of the expression to Nixon and says it has often carried “very totalitarian interpretations”.
Her argument extends to cultural disputes over cancellation. Asked about the cancellation of writer Ariana Harwicz at a festival in Granada, Pons says cancellations become particularly dangerous when directed at individuals rather than groups, movements or ideologies. People should be given the microphone and heard, she argues, so that their positions can be challenged or debated. Such dialogue requires silence as well as speech: “introspection, being willing to change the starting positions of each of us”.
The history of silence also exposes persistent differences in how men and women have been expected to speak. Pons points to proverbs and manuals of etiquette that prescribed silence as a virtue for women. Although such expectations have been challenged, she says women remain quieter than men when participation in public spaces is measured. Yet women have also historically been condemned for being too talkative, producing what she describes as a paradox in the education of women.
Studies measuring conversational silences, she says, indicate that women use silence more than men, including in television discussions and observable conversations. Language itself preserves the older assumptions. Expressions such as “calladita estás más guapa” — roughly, that a woman is prettier when she keeps quiet — and phrases such as “hacer capazo” or “hacer lavadero” have portrayed female conversation as inconsequential chatter.
Digital communication has created new forms of silence. Young people make fewer telephone calls, Pons says, often regarding a phone call as an unexpected and avoidable intrusion. At the same time, digital writing has proliferated. Being read without receiving a response has acquired a new meaning: silence now appears as the absence of a reply to a message. Pons argues that this form of silence is not necessarily reflective. Instead, it can represent passive consumption of algorithmically supplied videos and content.
Social media has also disrupted what sociologists call the spiral of silence. Pons says this has allowed previously suppressed or socially disapproved doctrines to gain visibility online, removing some of the barriers that once limited their public expression. She compares social networks to a river that should be observed without necessarily entering it. “Informatively, one has to look over and see the current,” she says, “but I remain silent there; that discussion is not mine.”
The cultural history of silence reaches back to Harpocrates, the deity associated with silence whose finger remains pressed to his lips in the familiar gesture. Pons notes that Harpocrates was an Egyptian-influenced divinity adopted by the Greeks and Romans, and points to a small Harpocrates medallion in the Museum of Roman Art in Mérida. The god may have faded from public memory, but his gesture has survived.
For Pons, the continuing political vocabulary of silence — expressions such as “no comment” and “neither confirm nor deny” — reveals how deeply speech and non-speech remain intertwined with power. “Democracy is a system in which the word has weight,” she says, “and the word of the person who governs is extremely important.”
