"Studies in the Way of Words": opportune or opportunistic?

This is a comment on Kramer´s post in "Studies in the Way of Words -- inopportune?". I have tried to post it as a comment there, but I wasn´t allowed. Apparently, the idea is that a comment cannot exceed certain limits. I won´t have a machine limiting me like that. So here it goes.

OK. And thanks. I have now pasted Kramer´s comment in Pirotologica for further consideration.
He writes, magisterially:

"This is an opportune time for addressing "opportune.""

--- Exactly. Consider Grice:

"This is an "inopportune" time to address "inopportune""

and discuss the oddity of its implicature.

Kramer:

"I think that we sometimes have to do things at inopportune times. So I don't see why one might not comment on the fact that something is being done at an "opportune" time, a time characterized, usually, by one's having incurred some of the capital costs of an activity by reason of having prepared for some other."

Yes. I follow that perhaps "inopportune" is the "word that wears the trousers", as Austin and Grice would say. It´s like "unintentional". Statutories mention that "he shot her unintentionally", as in "La forza del destino", by Verdi. (It´s shot "him", unintentionally, there).

To utter,

"He shot him intentionally"

is otiose in most of the cases. Ditto with "opportune". We are usually by default and ceteris paribus doing what we deem opportune at times. Etc.

Kramer´s scenario:

"My visit to my mother in the Philadelphia suburbs tomorrow will be an opportune time for me to visit the art museum in Trenton, NJ. (I won't do it, but it would be an opportune time.)"
I wanted to bring the reader´s attention -- not just Kramer. Recall this is a public blog! :) -- and even to my own attention -- the oddity of the preterite of "will" in English.

(1) I will
(2) I would

I never understood "I would". Now, Kramer´s sentence

(i)

features "would":

(i) My visit to my mother in the Philadelphia suburbs tomorrow WILL be an opportune time for me to visit the art museum in Trenton, NJ. I WON't do it, but it WOULD be an opportune time"

-- I have elapsed your brackets. I think that your (i) is sort of impeccable because, perhaps unintentionally sneakily, you manage to turn the "will be opportune", onto "would be opportune" which implicates, but "it will not".

This is just implicatural:

(x) When I was a child I would bathe naked.

-- I still do. So the "would" is otiose.

So rephrasing your (i) onto (ii), which turns the "would" back onto "will" -- i.e. deeming your change of tense a sneak -- it becomes:

(ii) (a) My visit to my mother in the Philadelphia suburbs tomorrow WILL be an opportune time for me to visit the art museum in Trenton, NJ.

This is best actually in the present tense:

(ii)(c) My visit to my mother in the Philadelphia suburbs IS an opportune time for me to visit the art museum in Trenton, NJ.

Then we continue with the second bit,

(ii)(d)My visit to my mother in the Philadelphia suburbs is an opportune time for me to visit the art museum in Trenton, NJ. I don´t do it, but it is an opportune time"

The oddity, I claim, has to do with what Nowell-Smith, before Grice, called "contextual oddity" -- it breaches the standard contextual implication.

Consider

(A) I´m always doing inopportune things.

Or Kenneth Halliwell, reported in "Prick up your ears": the well-known homosexual who killed his lover, Joe Orton, the renowned playwright:

(B) Homosexuals disgust me.

The oddity is not logical. Although Nowell-Smith diverges from Grice here. For Nowell-Smith logical oddities are a sub-part of contextual oddities.

It basically shows that "inopportune" is an unhappy word in Austin´s use of "unfelicitious", for it usually, especially in the first-person present, indicate some "weakness of the will" on the part of the utterer. ("akrasia").

On the other hand, you are right, and I´m just rambling!

Kramer concludes his post:

"I don't see the objection to my saying (i), especially if I can use the word to describe an action I might have taken but didn't."

Well, the "special" scenario is just apt. In fact, it´s precisely the A-philosophical claims Grice considers in "Prolegomena" to his "William James Lectures". This is a googlebook. He lists words that philosophers have found "tricky" -- his own "seem" included -- and considers way outs to explain their alleged oddity.

Some people disimplicate. I don´t. Some people may go to disimplicate any odd implicature the expression of choice may bring to stupid addressees. This may be the case of "opportune", or again, it may not.

JLS