Formality as Beyond Convention

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"You are SO conventional, darling!"

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Recall Liza Minnelli in "Cabaret" when Bryan Roberts, the epitome of the Brit, is unable to express his feelings on the passing of a train:

"You are so _conventional_, darling."

-- True, for that slut, almost everything expect hardest sex _is_ conventional.

Grice wants to say that if you say "high ho", you are being 'informal'. It would be otiose to say that 'high ho' has a CONVENTIONAL meaning. Ditto for 'President' (as in "The President's advisers approved the idea").

Grice writes on p. 361 when he defines 'formality' as being BEYOND 'convention'. Convention need not FIGURE in either the sufficient or the necessary condition in the analysis of 'form' here:

He says he will refer to

"'formality'" [emphasis Grice's]

which he expands as being such,

"whether OR NOT the relevant
signification is PART
of the conventional meaning
of the signifying expression."

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So he is looking for a more eidetic, or ideational, account of the 'form', -- the shape of the English, the 'eidos', the 'morphe', whatever. Surely these are abstract notions and an appeal to something as vague and mundane as a convention between people is totally un-Cartesian.