The Meaning of Alice

In "Aristotle on the multiplicity of being" Grice considers:

'context-sensitive'

(I never liked that phrase, since I think none of us is too blunt to go context-insensitive, except perhaps Dr. Katz in New Jersey who would sense anonymous letters to his friends, "You have halitosis").

vis a vis

-- a French poem

-- a French citizen

-- a French professor

He submits that there is a 'kernel' meaning

"of, or pertaining to, France"

-- with specifications 'upon context', 'upon request', 'on occasion'.

One wonders.

The problem with "France" is the upper-clase letter.

Recall Alice through the looking-glass:

HD: What name did you say you had?
A: Alice.
HD: Wrong! You never said such thing.
A: I thought you meant you wanted to know what my name was.
HD: Had I meant that I would have said it.
A: Alice. My name is Alice.
HD: Mmpf. Pretty nice, by the sound of it. What does it mean?
A: Mmpf. Must a name mean something?
HD: Of course it does. Mine means the shapely shape I have.

Sutherland in "Language and Lewis Carroll" (Mouton Linguarum Series Maior -- a book that cost me a few) writes that Carroll is into amusing Mill, his friend and author of "System of Logic". As P. Alexander also remarked (cited by Gardner, Annotated Alice).

For Mill, names have no sense, only reference. In Looking-Glass land, the reverse holds: words have no sense ('glory', 'impenetrability', 'jabberwock'), only authorial reference; whereas proper names have only sense with their referent made ostensively known to the addressee.

Etc.

So one wonders:

the meaning of "France"???

Surely we can say, "no need to delve so deep". You are 'analysing 'French' in terms of "France". "No need to go the whole hog and analyse 'France'"

Whatever. Regardless. The wiki entry for France notices that this puzzled Murray in 2001, p. 1.

"The meaning of "Frank" is obscure. Some say it means 'fierceful'. Some don't. Some say it's after the weapon this tribe used: the francisca, or javalin. But Otto Weistphel-stroesser argues, "Why, we might just as well say that the francisca was so-called because the Franks used it". Which means, you guess it right: square one".

Similarly, my bedside book, "The origin of English surnames", reads:

Grice: aristocratic English surname
of Anglo-Norman descent. Coat of
arms as per Debrett. Ancestor: a
grey-haired baron.
Alternatively, it may be a vulgar
Scots surname, meaning 'pig'.