Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Grice's "man in the street"

There was a query at the HOTEL -- I'm retrieving posts. (This stands for History of the English Language, -- where I dropped my occasional Griceanism). As to the origin of 'man in the street'. I noted that after googling, I was regretting that 'woman in the street' only means 'prostitute'. Now I want to double check (with Chapman's book) if Grice did use 'man in the street'.

Personally I prefer _everyman_ which I find charming when upper-cased, as

"I don't know what you say but Everyman says "some meaning not all"".

I find that doubly offensive in that the implicature of 'says' is wrong and plus it's further implicated that 'you' is not part of 'every' which unless you are talking to a chimp, or something, needs to be lifted or trumped. Etc.

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