"How Clever Language Is!" (Grice to Warnock, apocryphal)

--- by JLS
------ for the GC.

Well, it wouldn't be apocryphal. Warnock said it -- first in 1973, "Saturday Mornings", in I. Berlin et al, "Essays on Austin" (Routledge), and repr. in Warnock, "Morality and Language" (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982).

So he knew.

On the other hand we have Jones:

"This is horrible, but there may be nothing better, natural languages are a mess, however wonderful."

Yes.

The context for Warnock's remark:

"We had been examining the language of perception --
this was NOT incidentally, on a Saturday morning --"

implicating: not under the grim sight of Austin --.

but at some evening when providing the university lectures in the philosophy of perception. Warnock was Grice's junior by ten years -- and he would later become the Vice-Chancelor of Oxford. The ONLY time when Oxford was properly reigned over.

---

"and we had found that 'visum', while a charmer, was otiose."

For Warnock and Grice had introduced 'the visum of a cow' -- as longer for 'a cow' ("I saw a cow in the meadow").

So, it's when speakers -- however unordinary, or extraordinary as Warnock and Grice -- yet you have simplifiers who Kant think of Grice as anything but an 'ordinary-langauge philosopher'! -- try to go beyond the mess that English is that English strikes back with a vengeance!