In Word and Object, Quine presents his project of the regimentation of natural language, one step of regimentation being the introduction of variables. This is important as it allows him to articulate his famous slogan: to be is to be the value of a variable. It looks like a paradox that Quine, who takes such pains to convince us about the usefulness and indispensability of variables, shows us at the same time how to dispense with variables. Specifically, in a paper that appeared in the very same year as Word and Object, he shows how the language of the first-order predicate logic can be translated into a completely variableless language. The aim of this talk is to throw some new light on this apparent paradox.