How to designate a variable within a string quote in R? - r

Hi Stack Overflow community, thank you so much in advance for any help on this issue.
I'm interested in writing a non-interactive Rscript that designates variables that are read in from the command line. For example:
Rscript ./script {1} {2}
The {1} is an argument I pass to the script and the {2} is an argument corresponding to the full path that points to a text file composed of one column, filled with numbers and names.
I wrote a small Rscript whose function is to read in the text file and delete the rows that contain a particular string. I want the string to correspond to a variable I designate at the beginning of the script and provide on the command line. So far, my script reads:
args = commandArgs(trailingOnly=TRUE)
POP = args[1]
FREQ = args[2]
# read the file in
POP.freq <- paste0("FREQ")
# write a function to remove the rows that hold the string "POP"
clean_names <- function(x, ...) {
POP.freq[!POP.freq$POP == "POP",]
}
The problem is that in the function where I designate the string to be removed: "POP", R reads this literally as "POP" and not whatever the argument is I am trying to pass it (usually the name of a country e.g. Germany). In bash, the $ designates the variable but I am not sure what the equivalent is in R. How can I designate that POP is a variable within the string but also let R know that it is a string I am trying to identify.
I would appreciate any advice on this matter!

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