noun
A speaking or noticing of anything, usually in a brief or cursory manner.
I will make mention of thy righteousness.
And sleep in dull, cold marble, where no mention / Of me more must be heard of.
verb
To make a short reference to something.
Finance is seldom romantic. But the idea of peer-to-peer lending comes close. This is an industry that brings together individual savers and lenders on online platforms.[…]Banks and credit-card firms are kept out of the picture. Talk to enough people in the field and someone is bound to mention the “democratisation of finance”.
To utter a word or expression in order to refer to the expression itself, as opposed to its usual referent.
I can illustrate this by mentioning the word lead. Now you have no way of knowing for sure which meaning I have in mind until I give it some context by using it in a sentence.
If the verbatimness view derives from the popular notion that DST repeats 'the actual words spoken', a second line of thought takes its cue from Quine's (1940: 23–26, 1960: 146–156) philosophical distinction between words which are “used” vs. words which are merely “mentioned”.